Christchurch Meccano Club
Christchurch Meccano Club was founded in 1929, and is the oldest continuously running Meccano club in the world. The club is unfortunately not as busy as it was in the heydays of Meccano, but there is a reliable and growing membership of Meccano enthusiasts who meet every month.
The New Zealand Meccano Exhibition
Christchurch Meccano Club is proud to announce that it has been selected to run the biennial New Zealand Meccano Exhibition, in association with the New Zealand Federation of Meccano Modellers. This exhibition will be held over Easter weekend in 2009, on Saturday and Sunday the 11th and 12th of April.Exhibitors set up on the Friday 10th April (Good Friday), and the exhibition is open to Meccano enthusiasts on the Saturday morning, and the general public on Saturday afternoon and all day Sunday.
The exhibition website is at www.meccano2009.co.nz
Exhibitors from around the world are already planning to be with us, and if you would like to bring and display a model or collection we'd love to hear from you. Please contact us by clicking here.
Pictures and videos of models shown at the 2007 Easter exhibition in Wellington are on this page here.
Join us!
The Christchurch Meccano Club meets on the first Friday of every month except January, at St John's Church hall, corner of Ferry Rd and St Johns Rd in Woolston. We start around 7:30pm. Visitors are most welcome, bring your models or part-completed projects along! Drop us an email if you like, to find out what's going on.
Recent meetings
To see pictures and a report from any of the recent meetings of the Christchurch Meccano Club, click on the appropriate button below:
History of the club
There is a huge amount of historical documentation relating to the club, dating back to before its creation in 1929. We are starting to scan and upload the most interesting parts of this documentation, so come back to check for more history regularly!The Coupling
Here are a few issues of The Coupling, no less than the "Official Organ of the Christchurch Meccano Club" according to the subtitles. The first issue is from December 1936. The writing is clearly from a different era, and highlights include the sanctimonious drivel of the first couple of pages in issue 1, and the list of parts available to Club members shown in the third issue. Lead weights, sand and wood rollers, signal arms, and a GRB were all available to the club's members. On the same page, there is a helpful suggestion to cut out a rectangle of the paper and cover "liberally with treacle and arsenic", giving you a "flypaper of excellent quality".We can only wonder whether this kind of helpful advice to the lads in the club might have had something to do with the reported drop in membership from a high of 85 in the early 30's to a minimum of 12. However, by the end of 1938 things look a lot more healthy, including friendly but intense competition between the Club and the Ashburton Meccano Club, and mention of a newly-formed Hagley Park Meccano Club.
The Coupling, December 1936 issue (click on a page to view it)
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