World’s last dedicated Meccano factory to close in France

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/23/last-dedicated-meccano-factory-to-close-in-france

by vixen99 • 3 years ago

105 118 3 years ago

Shame. IIRC the same thing would have happened to Lego if they wouldn't have had branched out into collectables and IP licensing. They were on a steep decline in the '00s and then launched the Bionicle line for kids to collect then started licensing IPs.

Every time I go into a shop looking for Lego, I no longer see many generic sets: castles, pirate ships, cars, trucks, but they're all big name IP licenses: Pirates of the Caribbean ships, Harry Potter castles, Volvo Trucks, Range Rover SUVs, McLaren cars, BMW motorcycles, etc.

Now they're all just fancy collectables meant to sit on display instead of being generic sets where you had to use your imagination to make what you want it to be: that generic looking car could be a McLaren, could be a Ferrari, could be whatever you wanted it to be. Then take it apart and mix it with the rest of your sets to create something original.

And the IP licensing is reflected in the price for the sets. I wouldn't be surprised if many of Lego's customers are just nostalgic grown men with disposable income, instead of curious kids.

Me thinks Meccano should have taken the same path if they wanted to survive but I'm not an executive in the toy industry to know for sure.

lordnacho2• 3 years ago

That's pretty much it. The only original Lego stuff left is the city stuff. Even new lines within the Lego world is done as if it's licensed: Ninjago is it's own TV series. Friends also has a TV series.

They've figured out that you sell more Lego with a story behind it.

Does it change much? I don't know, there's still a lot of cool builds.

simplotek6• 3 years ago

Ninjago is Lego's own production.

The Friends Lego set seems to be in line with their investment in adult demographics, in the sense of being product lines that are decorative show pieces instead of play things.

TylerE• 3 years ago

The selection of sets at retail tends to be a bit biased.

They've released some really nice non-IP sets in the last few years - Titanic, Saturn V, the various modular buildings, the Colloseem... of course these are the big adult-oriented sets that cost several hundred dollars.

bombcar8• 3 years ago

Target actually carries a decent amount of those around here in store. Might be ebcause there’s a Lego store nearby.

simplotek6• 3 years ago

Every time I went into a shop looking for Lego, I no longer see many generic Lego sets

That sounds like an issue with the stores you go to. Even in big department stores I see generic Lego sets (City, Technic, Duplo, etc) next to licensed ones.

Freak_NL2• 3 years ago

Yeah, Duplo, City, and Technic are the basic ranges any toy store is bound to have.

egeozcan• 3 years ago

Regarding Lego, as long as that IP stuff allows them to keep producing the excellent generic stuff (which is still easy to buy online, less so in stores, at least in Germany), more power to them!

I think the biggest threat to the generic lines is the fact that they have to compete against other generic stuff that's produced cheaper. So they need to differentiate. Amazon is filled to the brim with the no-name generic building blocks that are not as high quality as Lego, and apparently you can't differentiate purely base don the quality alone.

Even in clothing, there are less and less, not high-fashion but high quality for not totally unreasonable price brands.

simplotek6• 3 years ago

I think the biggest threat to the generic lines is the fact that they have to compete against other generic stuff that's produced cheaper.

I'd say the biggest threat is Lego's pricing. Even Lego's small generic sets are sold for over 20€. Even Lego fans pause when faced with that kind of price tags.

Ralfp• 3 years ago

I an happy that Lego Pick a Brick exists. Sure, it costs small fortune, but if you are interested only in building parts collection for experimentation, eg. you need 20 black beams of every type and bricklink has no people selling in your region.

mpsprd• 3 years ago

I wonder what happened to K'nex. It was amazing as a kid, and wasn't really IP friendly, more focused on contraptions.

bombcar8• 3 years ago

https://basicfun.com/knex/ Still made - I see them now and then.

zgs• 3 years ago

Meccano tried licensed IP: Gears of War, Rabbids, Tin Tin, Sonic. Possibly others I don't remember.

Lego has more cash and clout to get more desirable IPs with less strict restrictions of course.

I think the real reason for the decline of Meccano/Erector is that it is more fiddly than Lego is. I almost wrote difficult but I don't think that's quite the right word -- there is a lot more freedom in construction with makes assembly, even following instructions, trickier.

janoc2• 3 years ago

It is also a lot more expensive to produce. Lego is just injection molded ABS plastic.

Meccano/Erector (or the Czech Merkur) are all metal, die cut/stamped out of sheet metal and using actual screws. Moreover, the French factory being closed was practically hand-making it, it was not at all automated. So as economically inefficient and expensive as it gets.

Also these types of construction sets just aren't as amenable to the usual licensed IP - you can't really make Batman or Star Wars figurines out of sheet metal. These sets don't really have a history of mixing a lot of plastic parts with the usual metal bits. It doesn't work well together and also the result looks a bit weird with all those holes. In addition, the types of shapes you can make out of it are more limited due to the way it is manufactured (or it would get very expensive if custom bent/shaped parts were required). Whereas for Lego it is just another mold being used so they have a lot more flexibility.

Meccano/Erector or Merkur are really most suitable for what they were originally modeled after and designed for - mechanical machines, engines, contraptions, etc. Lot of real-world machines were prototyped with Merkur - e.g. the first contact lenses were made by their inventor using a Merkur machine.

Sadly those types of toys are not as much in vogue today - or need to be full of flashy electronics, connected to a phone and ideally licensed from Disney to be able to sell them ...

blacklion3• 3 years ago

I've thought, that Lego doesn't make basic generic stuff anymore, but the I found youtube channel "Brickcrafts" where one Austrian guy build amazing Lego city. He buys generic stuff by tons no problem.

ryukoposting2• 3 years ago

It's no secret that Lego is marketing to adults. The botanicals sets are explicitly designed for people who want to decorate their home. Many of the "creator expert" sets show adults building the sets in the ad material.

When I was a kid, I didn't treat the licensed sets as "special collectibles." I had Ferrari/Bionicle/etc sets, and all of that stuff got mixed into the same bin eventually (except one of the Ferraris, which I still have to this day). Not sure why a kid would treat any given branded set differently because of the branding, I kept the Ferrari because I like it.

Sidebar: a standard measure in the Lego community is "price per piece," and the licensed sets do tend to be more costly. That's not a hard-and-fast truth, though. This blog has a great breakdown from a couple years ago: https://brickbucks.net/what-is-lego-price-per-piece/

mcphage2• 3 years ago

It's no secret that Lego is marketing to adults. The botanicals sets are explicitly designed for people who want to decorate their home.

Well, the “18+” labeling is a dead giveaway.

agentwiggles• 3 years ago

Yeah, I've always found the trend with adult Lego fans to be a bit funny - buy the set, build it, and put it on a shelf somewhere.

That's fine, you do you, AFOLs - but the way we played with Lego was we'd get a new set, build it, play with it in that form for a while, and then eventually, it got taken apart for some new idea and thrown into the bin.

There are 2 or 3 30 gallon tubs at my parent's house still filled with Lego, it must be the collected output of at least 100 different sets that were given to us for birthdays, Christmas, and also bought by us when we were old enough to have our own money and young enough to spend it on Lego. We had an air hockey table in the basement that was almost always covered with a landscape of fortresses, spaceships, and weird Bionicle monsters. Good times.

nicolas_t• 3 years ago

Another construction toy that I loved as a kid but disappeared https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construx

peatmoss• 3 years ago

They were fantastic. There was some kind of marketing event at a shopping mall in upstate NY when I was young. Construx were brand new, and to my utter shock my parents bought some for me. It felt very out of character for my parents to buy toys like this, but they picked a winner in doing so.

nuancebydefault3• 3 years ago

There exist also themes like Ninjago, invented by lego. In fact lego keeps reinventing itself so it never goes out of fashion.

That said, over the years, creating new stuff from existing sets became harder and harder, I find this a pity.

rasz• 3 years ago

fancy collectables meant to sit on display

Star Wars Toy Commercial - SNL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYyuo7gm-aQ

fooker• 3 years ago

I used to have one of these as a kid!

tomcam• 3 years ago

Man, I always wanted a Meccano factory, you lucky son of a bitch

IshKebab2• 3 years ago

I guess I'll have to get "adult Meccano" for my kids (aluminium extrusions) :-D

amelius3• 3 years ago

Or buy a laser plotter and make your own parts.

IshKebab2• 3 years ago

Yeah sure I'll use that spare £5k and unused room I have lying around.

WillAdams3• 3 years ago

Makerslide has been an interesting development along these lines.

There are other things such as:

https://bitbeam.org/

still waiting to see what will stick in the market.

johnwalkr3• 3 years ago

Maker beam is nice, it’s 10mm x 10mm cross-section which is much smaller than you can normally find. There’s probably a cheap knock off version by now too.

JKCalhoun• 3 years ago

We seem to be leaving the Industrial Age in the dust. That is too bad. From Tinker Toys to Lincoln Logs to Lego to Erector — even a weird 70's toy, the Hasbro Astrolite, my childhood was filled with construction toys. Engineering, thinking in 3 dimensions, creativity, mechanical movements, "sculpting", re-playability were all there.

I hope those things never go away.

(I remember some IQ-like test as a youth that showed I was off the charts in "Spatial Reasoning" — no doubt helped by my constant manipulation of construction blocks/tpys.)

eastbound• 3 years ago

In my excellent engineering school in France, one group reliably had very bad marks at technical drawings, the Morrocans. It required seeing the pieces in 3D based on flat drawings. It’s not IQ since they all went on to have great careers, and most performed excellently in calculus or language.

It was also a specific type of Morrocans: Those who strived enough at school to emigrate to France, compared to a specific type of French students, those who succeed in engineering.

To this day, it’s still a mystery to me why a specific group could be so markedly different in only one subject matter. Could it be that Morrocans who succeeded had had no time in their childhood to play spatially? My favorite theory is they didn’t have as much Lego in Morrocco as we (at least future engineers) had in France.

mkoubaa• 3 years ago

This probably isn't the reason but people who spend more time in nature have less spatial intuition about artificial things like 90 degree angles and perfect circles.

A possibility is that aphants have an advantage in abstract thought so they are the top percentile in maths. If the 96th percentile (in standardized tests of maths) of Moroccans studied at your school instead of the 99th, I would expect them to be better at drawing.

rvba2• 3 years ago

Moroccans also had to spend a lot of time learning French.

They probably had to study Ebglish too.

People often forget how long it takes to learn another language.

dopidopHN• 3 years ago

Are you french? I'm asking because if so you might remember the "techno" class in middle school.

Those classes introduced 3d modeling for me ( in the 90s, on paper, without computer )

That was not a important class, but you were left knowing how to draw and read a 3d shape in several 2d views

amelius3• 3 years ago

What saddens me is that despite technological advances and scaling, these toys remained expensive as hell.

WirelessGigabit2• 3 years ago

It's actually worse, quality has gone down with many things.

agumonkey2• 3 years ago

I often wonder if this is named and studied.

simplotek6• 3 years ago

We seem to be leaving the Industrial Age in the dust.

I wouldn't say that. My take is that producing small metalic pieces is such a trivial task nowadays that it makes far more sense to subcontract this instead of maintaining a full blown factory.

I know people in aerospace that can order custom pieces with tight tolerances in whatever alloy they choose, choose the production method and treatments, and get those pieces delivered to their doorstep in a matter of days.

A Meccano set doesn't even come near regarding demand and tolerances, and I'm sure that it can be as expensive to assemble as plain old nails, and requiring far less specialized equipment.

Turing_Machine• 3 years ago

I recall that they even tried to make Lincoln Logs out of plastic for a short while, but there was a near-universal uproar.

agumonkey2• 3 years ago

Maybe 3d printing will inherit this. Even though it won't probably feel the same. Simple mechanical toys vs 3d printed electromechanical drones .. not exactly similar.

baggsie2• 3 years ago

I'm not surprised (albeit slightly saddened) - I bought my 6 year old boy the set pictured and the quality it terrible - it's plastic and the tolerances are so bad the nuts can never be done up to any tightness before slipping. The instructions were also akin to a crappy toy you'd buy off AliExpress.

fovc• 3 years ago

Did you buy it on Amazon by any chance? I had this issue with another branded toy and it turned out to be a knockoff

baggsie2• 3 years ago

Nope - Joué Club (a toy store chain in France).

janoc2• 3 years ago

Don't buy cheap plasticky Chinese copies. Buy Czech Merkur instead:

https://merkurtoys.cz/

Merkur is about as old as Meccano and Erector and boys from the former Eastern Bloc are most likely very familiar with it.

samsk• 3 years ago

Fun fact: Merkur was used to build world first machine for casting soft contact lenses :)

timeon4• 3 years ago

I used my old set recently when I quickly had to hack construction for grow-lamps.

GordonS• 3 years ago

I loved Meccano as a boy, and bought some for my son last Christmas - what a huge disappointment! As you said, it's plastic now instead of metal, and not even good quality plastic. It flexes too much, and soon showed white stress marks. Difficult or impossible to tighten things properly, one piece comes loose as you're tightening another.

Also, yes, the instructions for their building ideas were crap by comparison with Lego's.

I'm 100% certain it was a legitimate Meccano set, as we bought it at a brick and mortar toy store, not Amazon.

We stuck to Lego after that.

lproven2• 3 years ago

Just out of interest, there is also a very similar rival toy, which is basically "metric Meccano": Merkur.

https://english.radio.cz/merkur-czech-toy-which-you-can-buil...

https://www.merkurtoys.cz/

ChuckNorris893• 3 years ago

That's really cool. The reason all these Meccano-like sets never took off is that they're so fiddly. Unlike Lego you don't just need the beams and your fingers, you need screws, washers and screwdrivers. Taking them apart then becomes a tedious nightmare instead of satisfyingly pulling them apart with your fingers or just smashing it on the floor.

tonyarkles• 3 years ago

I remember getting a small NiCd electric screwdriver for Mecanno when I was maybe 8. Complete game changer! Still not as easy to disassemble as Lego, but sometimes that was a feature (e.g. when making things that could move it was nice that they didn’t RUD if they fell off the table)

lproven2• 3 years ago

It's true, but, to quote Dr Ben Goldacre, "I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that."

Meccano (and Merkur) use proper fasteners. So, you're learning useful life skills with the fiddly bits.

But that also means the joins are much stronger, so you can build working machines that can handle real loads in Meccano.

Meta-but: when you do this, you discover that the thin metal plates are not strong. So, you need to learn to build box section structures and so on, which in itself is a real-life engineering skill which can help if you later go on to building structures from real-world materials such as metal tubing, wood, bamboo, etc.

So yes, the fiddliness is a pain, but it's an educational pain that leads to more learning...

Until you end up with the skills to build multi-meters-tall objects and working machinery.

Whereas Lego doesn't scale up well. Even large Lego sculptures, which are mostly static and unmoving, not machines, must be glued together. But that means you have to do un-glued test builds, get it right, then tear it down and repeat the entire process but with adhesives.

Above fairly trivial level, what Lego teaches is bad practices and bad engineering. Which is not a criticism of Lego! It's a toy and meant to be one, and it's a great one. But building complex machines is not what it was meant for -- whereas that's exactly what Meccano is good for.

csdvrx• 3 years ago

Legos were mostly for boys.

I was only a bit jealous as I had a "rival toy" which offered more possibilities: it was 2 round parts with a thin part in the middle. It offered shear tolerance in this thin part, so you have complex fractal like shapes in a X-Y plane by gently bending it to go from 2 to 3 hooks.

You could also grow these shapes in the Z plane by embedding the thin part of other pieces inbetween the round parts, snapping it into place.

I can't remember the name ATM, but here's a picture: http://www.filipiknow.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Pinoy-L...

blacklion3• 3 years ago

In USSR there were a lot of Meccano knock-offs but almost no Lego knock-offs (there were some made in East Germany, but they were scarce). I'd have a ton of different, mostly compatible, sets and play with them for hours.

Original Lego becomes available right after USSR crash (it was very expensive for 1990s in newborn Russia, but it pas present in several posh toy shops), and Meccano never appears in Russia and Soviet knock-off sets were forgotten.

Only many years later (when Lego was very well-known already for years) I've learned about Meccano.

Looks like Lego has much more competent marketing & distribution department.

bombcar8• 3 years ago

It’s only been in the last 20 years or so that knockoff Lego got anywhere NEAR the quality of genuine. At the turn of the millennium knockoff Lego was PVC and so badly toleranced that you could barely put a medium or larger set together without it falling apart.

That’s changed now, but it would have been much easier to knockoff low tolerance metal pieces in the 70-90s

blacklion3• 3 years ago

Yes, now I know how amazing and advanced Lego is from technological point of view, real marvel of precision molding.

But I'm talking more about marketing: post-USSR countries were ready to Meccano (because parents had played with Meccano clones, not Lego clones), but Lego won, and almost nobody knows about Meccano,

Tade0• 3 years ago

I remember getting a Meccano set for my 5th birthday - it gave me access to a screwdriver, which I later used to disassemble some other toys I had.

Like everything it had its soviet knockoff - colored communist dark red and naturally somewhat larger, so it wasn't compatible, but had one feature I never saw in the western counterpart: an "engine" with a functioning flywheel.

sandworm101• 3 years ago

Meccano is dead. Long live lego. Meccano chose not to adapt, instead becoming an anachronistic thing bought by grandparents as a christmas present. Every kid hates it. I've never bled while playing with lego. Ive never not bled every time i've used meccanno or scalextric.

Gigachad2• 3 years ago

Kids these days are too soft. If you don’t get cut a few times while playing, what’s the point?

brnt2• 3 years ago

I don't know, I'm in my mid 30ies and I thought Meccano was old fashioned when I was a kid. Lego Technic is a lot faster to snap together. Meccano seemed less of a toy to me and more of a way to make art that would stay montaged rather than easily broken down and be reused.

timeon4• 3 years ago

make art

Me constructing cross-bows from Meccano like (Merkur) as kid: >.>

johnwalkr3• 3 years ago

I had my Dad’s set as a young teen (I think it was from the 50s) and like another commenter said they were fiddle especially to take apart. You can build some impressive stuff with it but it gets tedious after a while. Some of the sets a hilarious by today’s standards, I remember one set of instructions was to make an automatic match dispenser/striker.

Lego technic is a better toy.

rawling• 3 years ago

Can you still get Technic kits to build machinery? All I seem to be able to find now is replica vehicles, albeit some still seem to have pneumatic parts.

johnwalkr3• 3 years ago

I think you're right. They seem to have less useful-for-tinkering pieces and more aesthetic but less useful pieces now.

timeon4• 3 years ago

I have no urge to say better or worse. Just different.

otikik• 3 years ago

I tried Meccano twice, and in both cases I had the same problem: independently of how tight I put them, the nuts and bolts would become loose, even before finishing assembling the set. Sad to see this business go, but not surprising.

Waterluvian3• 3 years ago

When I recently visited my dad with 4yo and 6yo, he pulled out three “Meccano” sets, mainly in German, from the 1960s or maybe 70s.

Everything is absolutely delightful. The parts are great quality. The boxes are amazing. And the manuals… wow. They’re basically engineering text book excerpts.

Apologies, I don’t know how to get it as one album:

https://ibb.co/qphSfC3 https://ibb.co/B6PGFDs https://ibb.co/wWrn9Rw https://ibb.co/5Tk8RPr https://ibb.co/dJJtYSZ https://ibb.co/Tq6wXyx https://ibb.co/4WVSgPR https://ibb.co/FK9spg7 https://ibb.co/0GKc5Qb https://ibb.co/jHRMSXW https://ibb.co/VMmT8DB

qazwsxedchac• 3 years ago

These aren't Meccano, they are East German "Construction" sets. A riff on the Meccano idea, but metric, and probably not paying license fees to Meccano at the time ;-) The parts will look great quality while played with only a little, but the plating has a habit of coming off in small sharp flakes if you ever bend them.

Waterluvian3• 3 years ago

Thanks for the information! These were given to my dad in the 90s by a colleague at Environment Canada. Now I’m curious how they got here from East Germany.

zvolsky• 3 years ago

Is it not Merkur?

The Czech version of the page says Frank Hornby patented the metal construction set in 1901. Merkur started just before the patent expired, long before the Cold War.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkur_(toy)

https://www.merkurtoys.cz/

WirelessGigabit2• 3 years ago

Brings me back to my first days with Lego Technic.

Serious question though, since these are from the 60s and 70s... any concerns about lead paint?

Waterluvian3• 3 years ago

I don’t see any paint in the sets. And the rust came off the parts pretty easily.

(the green and red painted parts don’t exist in any of the sets we have. I bet you those do have lead.)

prmoustache• 3 years ago

Most parts were raw on my sets and those of my dad and uncle.

Balgair• 3 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wv-PdL47YZ0

James May, of Top Gear fame, walking across a mechano bridge.

shortn• 3 years ago

James Mays' "Toy Stories" are my only exposure to Meccano. Favorite episode is the Meccano motorcyle on the Isle of Man.

iancmceachern• 3 years ago

The whole "Toy Stories" series is great

Avlin67• 3 years ago

I did play a lot of meccano when I was young, but today I think the brand did not evolve, meccano itself is great but the company did not reinvent itself sorry

mparramon• 3 years ago

Great read on Meccano vs Lego:

I’ve come up with a theory connecting three big zeitgeist things: the end of the zero-interest world, the ongoing AI panic, and the meaning crisis. I think it also connects all three to the climate crisis, but I’ll leave that topic aside for this essay since it’s too big.

https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/truth-in-inconvenience

WillAdams3• 3 years ago

I had a similar toy, but plastic, which came in an orange ammo can, w/ molded brandingo on the side --- Carboloy --- which I wish I could find information on.

World’s last dedicated Meccano factory to close in France

Related Stories