Hammerhead Crane
Built by Ralph Laughton in January 2017
Douglas Laing from Johannesburg submitted a VirtualMEC drawing of a hammerhead crane to the spanner list back in October 2016. The crane looked interesting and relatively simple to build — or so I thought.
It turns out that is very easy to unwittingly ‘cheat’ when using the dedicated Meccano drawing program. Parts can pass through solids and alignment can be skewed. This is particularly the case with bolt holes. Another ‘problem’ is there is nothing stopping the designer using lots of hard to come by parts. Even we, with our larger than average collection of parts do not have vast quantities of 5½” Narrow Strips!
The build was interesting. I made several small adjustments to the model, to make it work in the real world, and a few ‘improvements’ of my own in the winding house and the hook block was reworked.
More details can be found on our blog. The cord is my new ‘light’ version of RalphsString, available from our shop.