Retiree is simply nuts about Meccano
RETIRED university lecturer Graham Shepherd did not give himself many options about how he would spend his retirement: renovating his family home or building the world’s largest Meccano model.
He chose the latter, even though calculations showed that it would cost him about R2-million for the parts alone. Five years down the line, the one-ton miniature prototype of a German bucket-wheel excavator spans the hallway, lounge, and dining room of his home in Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape. “It’s pretty big,” said Shepherd. The 64-year-old former lecturer in applied mathematics has converted almost his entire home into a workshop. Brightly coloured cables run the length of what was once his facebrick lounge; containers of nuts, bolts and washers are neatly stacked on tables throughout.
Shepherd did not, in the end, shell out R2-million for the parts, but kept costs to a minimum by designing his own and getting them laser-cut by a factory in Port Elizabeth.
Furthermore, he single-handedly drilled about a million holes in pieces to assemble his model: a maze of metal strips, brackets, wheels, girders, rods, pulleys and sprockets and gears.
Shepherd, who started the project while still lecturing at Rhodes Uni- versity, said he spent months studying the Bagger 293, the biggest bucket-wheel excavator ever built, according to the Guinness Book of World Records.
The average bucket-wheel excavator weighs 12 000 tons, but the 225m-long Bagger 293, used in large-scale open-pit coal mining operations, lumbers in at 13 500 tons and is 95m high.
But Shepherd’s 12.5m-long version is nothing to scoff at.
Measuring 5.2m in height, it took more than 40 000 perforated parts, 80 000 washers, and 160 000 nuts and bolts to assemble — and that is excluding the 57 electrical motors it needs to operate.
Shepherd, who has slaved over his model for eight hours a day for the past five years, believes that his work could be the world’s largest Meccano model. He plans to submit his project to the Guinness Book of World Records to prove it.
Until now, the largest known Meccano model — constructed from 19 507 pieces and 50 560 nuts and bolts — was a 6.5m-high, 544kg giant Ferris wheel, built in 1990.
Shepherd said his project became quite stressful about a year ago when enthusiasts began following his progress via a blog set up by his wife, Eileen. “Many people worldwide are watching the progress,” he said.
“I started [the project] while still a lecturer and so back then I mostly worked on it on weekends and holidays. But once I retired, it became a full-time job [and] once I got going, the world record seemed within reach,” he said.
Shepherd matriculated at Christian Brothers College in Boksburg in 1966. He lectured at the universities of the Witwatersrand and Durban-Westville before joining the Rhodes faculty, where he spent the next 32 years, retiring in 2011.
For now, Shepherd is putting the finishing touches to his model before he puts it up for sale to “someone who has the space to display it properly”.
Once it is sold, he plans to jump into his next project — revamping his kitchen. Comment on this: write to tellus@sundaytimes.co.za or SMS us at 33971 www.timeslive.co.za