Category:Themed Meccano sets
When Lines Brothers took over the loss-making Meccano Ltd. in the 1960s, they set to work remarketing the product range to try to make it more exciting, and to try to bring the product line back to profitability.
Part of this involved changing the colour of Meccano's flat metal plates to a predominantly "zappy" yellow (with other parts in black or blue), and coming up with "themes" for the different numbered sets. The new yellow plates were good for making construction vehicles, and Set 3, with the help of some new "exciting" box artwork and model designs, became the "Highway Vehicles Set" (with a bold black "3" set into a white square in the lower right corner, so that people who understood the old numbering system would know what they were getting).
The new "yellow and blue" was probably a reference to the opposing "red and green" colours of the old sets, but also helped distance the new sets from any older dark red and green parts that had been painted with lead paint. Rather than try to explain which of the different shades of red and green had contained lead and which hadn't, it was easier to just let parents associate the new colours with "safe" Meccano.
"Themed" sets
- Play Set (Set 0)
- Junior Set (Set 1)
- Super Junior (Set 2)
- Highway Vehicles Set (Set 3)
- Airport Service Set (Set 4)
- Site Engineering Set (Set 5)
- Ocean Terminal Set (Set 6)
- Mountain Engineer's Set (Set 7)
- Breakdown Crew Set (Set 8)
- Masters Engineer's Set (Set 9)
External links
Pages in category ‘Themed Meccano sets’
The following 2 pages are in this category, out of 2 total.
