page_title: Mamod
section_title: Meccano engine
hierarchical_section_title: Mamod / Meccano engine
caption_attribution_description: English: A yellow Meccano MEC1 steam engine driving a workshop of Mamod tools.
context_page_description: Mamod is a British toy manufacturer specialising in manufacturing live steam models. The company was founded in 1937 in Birmingham in the UK by Geoffrey Malins. The name is a portmanteau of Malins Models. Malins started off making steam engines which were sold under the Hobbies brand name but he soon started selling them under the Mamod brand name. The first models produced were of stationary steam engines. Much later the company also began creating models of road rollers, traction engines, steam wagons and other steam road vehicles. These models were aimed at the toy market, so were simple to operate and ran at low boiler pressures for safety but were not accurate scale models.
  Most Mamod models use simple but effective oscillating cylinders, usually single-acting. Some of these engines have regulators either in the steam feed or exhaust but many others run unregulated or have a simple reversing mechanism to alter the cutoff, thus controlling the power/speed and direction of the engine.
context_section_description: Between 1965 and 1976 Malins produced a steam engine to the requirements of the Meccano company under whose label it was sold. It had a special base designed to facilitate building the engine into Meccano models. It incorporated a mechanism which shifted the cylinder in relation to the inlet and exhaust, so allowing it to run in reverse.
  After the Meccano branded version was discontinued, the same engine, with minor modifications, was later sold under the Mamod brand as the SP3. The original Meccano branded version never had an official name or model number but is now commonly called the MEC1.
caption: A Malins designed and built MEC1 dating from about 1970.
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