![]() ![]() Idea 1 came from a miniature butterfly net I’d bought in a job lot of dolls’ house furniture. An offset lump on a wheel turned round and round quite fast when detached from the broken bellows. ![]() Two metal bars moved irregularly backwards and forwards. Putting my woefully limited technological skills to work, I examined them. In most cases the motors worked fine, but the rubber diaphragms that created the bellows had perished, which meant they were silent. However the number of broken mechanisms gradually began to outnumber the remaining working sets and I started to wonder how they could be used. I sold dozens of them, and dozens more of the motor sets (with shredded newspaper and mouse droppings removed). When I put down woodwork and metalwork as my preferred technology options at school, I was allocated to domestic science (aka cooking and housework) and needlework classes.Ĭan I blame this background for my almost total ineptitude with anything mechanical? Maybe not, but still it took me many, many weeks of fruitless and frustrating experimenting to begin producing chirping and twirling birds, perched on little boxes of clockwork wonders. When I asked (every year) for a Meccano set for Christmas, my parents smiled and gave me a dolls’ pram or toy iron and ironing board. It seemed I had inadvertently bought up the entire remaining stock. There was also a sheet of rodent-nibbled instructions for putting them together and a hobbies annual from the early 1960s where I found the sets advertised for 9 shillings and sixpence each, for fixing into novelty cigarette boxes. Countless clockwork motors ranging from pristine to utterly wrecked, a huge box of small plastic birds and yellowing waxed envelopes with the precious brass keys and parts to join the birds to the mechanisms. In the days that followed, I gingerly investigated. As my hallway filled up with an endless stack of mouldering cardboard boxes and a musty smell I wondered whether any of the mice whose handiwork I’d witnessed earlier remained. ![]() I’d been expecting a dozen, or maybe twenty, for the money he was asking. “Do you have a van? No? I’ll drop them round to you tonight, then.” “God! No idea! Hundreds – at least,” he grinned. “And how many are there?” I asked eagerly. The whole thing, he explained, was controlled by a complex steel cam just visible amongst the whirring brass cogs and gears. Metal arms moved to and fro, a blue steel lever pumped the rubber bellows and a tiny Swanee whistle twittered its modulated tune. “Oh dear,” he said, carelessly tossing it back into the box and removing another, “They have been kicking around an attic for about 40 years, Not surprising, really. With the sort of smile a favourite uncle gives at children’s parties before performing magic tricks, he took a brass key from his pocket, began to wind the motor and with a loud snap, the spring broke. It seemed to be composed of brass, steel and rust, in more or less equal quantities, with a plastic section to one side which housed a rubber diaphragm. It was several years ago but I clearly recall the vendor reaching into a box of mouse-shredded newspapers and pulling out one of the little mechanisms for my inspection. I’ve written before about the day I answered a strange advert on a local noticeboard, offering ‘a flock of clockwork birds’. ![]()
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