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Manbench Industries; Purveyors of general mayhem since 1994, a blog to follow the crazed, possibly deranged projects and emotive musings, of an undergraduate engineer, and an apprentice organ builder who have always felt they were born in the wrong age. Follow us as we, re-write history, learn lost skills, discover strange new worlds, break things, rant at things, mend things, make new things and generally find ways of passing the day instead of doing "proper work" !

Tuesday 27 November 2012

Richard Trevithick's 'Catch Me Who Can?'

Here at Manbench, we've always held the work of the great engineer Richard Trevithick in high esteem, Trevithick revolutionized the application of steam to industry and in doing so constructed the first railway locomotive. Unfortunately he achieved little commercial success from his indeavors which included his exhibition loco 'Catch Me Who Can?' shown below:



After seeing a 5" gauge model of the locomotive, I quite fancied building a smaller one around about Mamod scale, however as with most ideas it got put to the back of my mind and nothing done about it. However, one day I was going through the spare parts drawer and coming across a spare set of Mamod loco wheels and this happened:


In this photo the locomotive is only a rolling chassis with no engine components inside of it. The boiler was from and old Mamod Minor 1, the frames were milled from some aluminium sheet and the rest was just from bits found in the workshop. The pencil for a chimney is only a temporary feature! Further work has progressed on this since the photo was taken - it's a case of finding the photos! Unfortunately work on this project has slowed down...something about 5 years of university getting in the way!

The Engineer.

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