In 1961, I joined Mec­ca­no Ltd. as an Appren­tice Tool­mak­er based at their fac­to­ry in Han­son Road, Ain­tree, Liv­er­pool. This fac­to­ry had con­sid­er­able mold­ing facil­i­ties for the pro­duc­tion of Bayko and Horn­by Dublo mod­els. After about six months I was trans­ferred to the main tool room at Binns Road. My start­ing wage was the prince­ly sum of £3 9s 11d (£3.50 in new mon­ey) for a 40 hour week.

The appren­tice­ship was well orga­nized, start­ing out by learn­ing to use the most com­mon machines in turn, after which you were placed along­side a ful­ly qual­i­fied tool­mak­er. I was very for­tu­nate to be placed under the top man in the tool room, Bil­ly Carr. As your skills improved your work became more respon­si­ble, mov­ing from jigs and fix­tures to (in my case) spe­cial­iz­ing in injec­tion molds.

At the age of 20 I had com­plet­ed two plas­tic injec­tion molds before being asked to take up a post in the Draw­ing Office. The molds were a 144 impres­sion wing mir­ror tool (used on var­i­ous pres­ti­gious Dinky saloons) and an 8 impres­sion mold for the seats and dash­board of the Dinky 161 Ford Mus­tang Fast­back.

In 1965, I trans­ferred to the Draw­ing Office as a Prod­uct Design­er earn­ing £9.50 per week.

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Products I designed

Between 1965 and 1970, I designed the fol­low­ing prod­ucts:

• Dinky 163 Volk­swa­gen 1600TL Fast­back
• Dinky 159 Ford Corti­na Mk II 
• Dinky 187 De-Toma­so Man­gus­ta 5000
• Dinky 153 Aston Mar­tin DB6
• Dinky 102 Joe’s Car
• Dinky 344 Long Wheel­base Land Rover
• Dinky 995/996 Boe­ing 2707 SST
• Elec­tric screw­driv­er for Mec­ca­no sets

The Dinky 159 Ford Corti­na Mk II mod­el uti­lized the same win­dow and seat unit as Dinky 154 Ford Taunus 17M. Man­ag­ing direc­tor Joe Fall­mann was­n’t impressed when he saw the first pro­duc­tion sam­ples of the Taunus. He did­n’t like the com­pli­cat­ed die split line around the air vent behind the rear side win­dow and demand­ed that it be sim­pli­fied. I don’t know if any of these exam­ples were made avail­able for sale.

The orig­i­nal pro­posed lay­out of the Dinky 102 Joe’s Car was giv­en to fel­low design­er Ter­ry Boland, but he had hard­ly got start­ed when he was pro­mot­ed to New Prod­ucts Man­ag­er and the work passed to me. Just before release for tool­ing, Man­ag­ing Direc­tor Joe Fall­man insist­ed on a flash­ing light with­in the engine cowl, requir­ing me to shoe horn a AAA bat­tery, switch and bulb hold­er into a chas­sis that was already filled with sev­er­al oth­er mech­a­nisms.

The Dinky 995/996 Boe­ing 2707 SST was tak­en right through to tool­ing with sev­er­al tools half com­plet­ed when Boe­ing announced the can­cel­la­tion of the real air­craft, caus­ing Mec­ca­no to fol­low suit. As a con­so­la­tion, I was pre­sent­ed with the pro­to­type mod­el.

Anoth­er chal­leng­ing prod­uct I worked on was an Elec­tric Screw­driv­er for use with Mec­ca­no sets. It was to be dri­ven by a 6 or 12 volt motor with pow­er sup­plied by a sep­a­rate mains trans­former. Sev­er­al obsta­cles became appar­ent, name­ly the unavail­abil­i­ty of com­mer­cial­ly pro­duced com­pact 6–12 volt motors capa­ble of deliv­er­ing the nec­es­sary torque to suf­fi­cient­ly tight­en the Mec­ca­no screws; fur­ther, any trans­former would have to be capa­ble of deliv­er­ing a cur­rent of up to 2.5 amps at 6–12 volts. There was no ques­tion of pro­duc­ing a motor or trans­former in-house as the nec­es­sary equip­ment had been sold or scrapped when Horn­by Dublo ceased pro­duc­tion in 1964/1965.

Joe Fall­man was very keen to have this screw­driv­er and ruled like an iron hand and usu­al­ly got what he want­ed. He did­n’t suf­fer fools or dither­ers light­ly, so you can imag­ine my hor­ror when I was sum­moned to a new prod­uct meet­ing chaired by him to explain the tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties that faced us.

I trot­ted in armed with per­for­mance graphs from var­i­ous motor man­u­fac­tur­ers to illus­trate the prob­lem. To my relief Joe under­stood imme­di­ate­ly, thanked me for being so can­did and I returned to my desk much relieved. Lat­er, my boss returned and asked if I could intro­duce a reduc­tion gear box to increase torque. This sug­ges­tion had ini­tial­ly been resist­ed due to the extra weight and cost. The use of nor­mal reduc­tion spur gear­ing took up too much space, so I hit upon the idea of using epicyclic gear­ing which is very com­pact. The design was com­plet­ed but nev­er tooled as the board felt the final cost was too steep.

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My career in the 1970s

The fol­low­ing events occurred in my career in the 1970s:

• 1970
  Moved from Prod­uct Design to the Tool Design Sec­tion.
• 1973
  There was a peri­od of indus­tri­al unrest in the Design Office, so I left and spent 12 months as a Senior Tool Design­er for Dun­lop GRG Divi­sion based in Skelmers­dale, Lan­cashire work­ing on auto­mo­tive prod­ucts.
• 1974
  Rejoined Mec­ca­no Ltd. as Chief Draughts­man for Prod­ucts.
• 1976
  Chief Draughts­man respon­si­ble for Prod­ucts and Tool­ing

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Although not com­mon­ly known, the self adhe­sive num­ber plates fit­ted to Dinky Toys are the ini­tials of staff with­in the Draw­ing Office includ­ing myself (VPM), also the year let­ter was reg­u­lar­ly changed in line with the DVLA (Dri­ver Vehi­cle Licens­ing Author­i­ty). This is a good indi­ca­tion of the age of many Dinky Toys although it can also be the sub­ject of abuse.

Obvi­ous­ly, besides design­ing new prod­ucts, much time had to be spent doing mod­i­fi­ca­tions, revis­ing mod­el issues and labels for dif­fer­ent coun­tries and chang­ing the design of many com­mon items such as axles, wheel cen­ters and tires. A lot of effort was put into mod­i­fy­ing a num­ber of exist­ing saloons to accom­mo­date the first type of Speed Wheels which was only pos­si­ble when the mod­el’s chas­sis was diecast.

By mod­ern stan­dards the Binns Road fac­to­ry did­n’t have an ide­al lay­out, hav­ing expand­ed organ­i­cal­ly as prod­ucts diver­si­fied. Some areas were locat­ed appro­pri­ate­ly, such as the diecast depart­ment which was adja­cent to cast­ing de-bur­ring, cast­ing clean­ing and the paint shop, and the small parts stores that were locat­ed adja­cent to the assem­bly room for ease of dis­tri­b­u­tion. How­ev­er, mold­ing and some fin­ished paint­ed parts had to be moved by elec­tric pal­let truck. At one time an over­head con­vey­or sys­tem linked the paint shop to the assem­bly room. Basi­cal­ly, dirty process­es were kept as far as pos­si­ble from the clean assem­bly room.

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Promotional models

There were three types of pro­mo­tion­al mod­els:

• The appli­ca­tion of a dif­fer­ent col­or scheme and/or trans­fers to an exist­ing mod­el. The cost of gen­er­at­ing the trans­fers would be cov­ered by the com­pa­ny request­ing the adver­tis­ing. Mod­els would be freely avail­able to all with pos­si­bly an ear­ly batch sup­plied to the adver­tis­er.
• As above but with mod­els sup­plied exclu­sive­ly to the adver­tis­er. Even­tu­al­ly exam­ples of these mod­els would fil­ter back into the gen­er­al sec­ond hand toy mar­ket, for exam­ple the Dinky 945 Lucas Oil Tanker.
• The tool­ing of a new pro­mo­tion­al mod­el, where some pro­por­tion of tool­ing costs and cer­tain­ly labels and trans­fers would be fund­ed by the adver­tis­er. I know of only two such mod­els: the Dinky 222 Hes­keth 308E F1 rac­ing car man­u­fac­tured for Olym­pus Cam­eras and the Dinky 115 UB Taxi for Unit­ed Bis­cuits.
  
  I believe Olym­pus took 20,000 units after which it became avail­able to the gen­er­al pub­lic. To meet a very tight sched­ule, it was nec­es­sary to use and mod­i­fy parts from the Dinky 225 Fer­rari F1 tool­ing which effec­tive­ly elim­i­nat­ed the Dinky 225 from the range.
  
  The UB Taxi sup­plied to Unit­ed Bis­cuits in a plain white box was avail­able to cus­tomers who had col­lect­ed suf­fi­cient tokens from bis­cuit pack­ets.

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It was very com­mon for Mec­ca­no Ltd. to have the cost of pro­duc­ing labels and trans­fers cov­ered by the pro­duc­er of the arti­cle or the ser­vice being adver­tised, even though no spe­cial run of mod­els would be spec­i­fied. The adver­tis­er would just be grate­ful that their prod­uct or ser­vice appeared for free on every toy sold. This is true for dozens of Dinky Toys man­u­fac­tured over the years.

Many toys had their body exper­i­men­tal­ly mold­ed in plas­tic. To my knowl­edge the only toy that was changed and made it to mar­ket was Dinky 354 The Pink Pan­ther Car. This change was done before its pub­lic release because the diecast body did­n’t trav­el far enough when pro­pelled by its gyro­scop­ic fly­wheel. Any oth­er plas­tic body parts around today were pos­si­bly ‘appro­pri­at­ed’ after test­ing.

Only one Dinky, the 992 Avro Vul­can bomber was cast in alu­minum at Binns Road. Tool life was very short so very few entered the mar­ket place.

Apart from Dinky Toys, the office designed a range of ‘MOGUL’ steel toys to com­pete with ‘TONKA’ and ‘PRIMA’ Mec­ca­no, a con­struc­tion toy for the very young.

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Post Meccano

In May 1979, the atmos­phere at Mec­ca­no felt bad so I resigned and took up a post as Senior Tool Design­er with a grow­ing mold mak­er based in Dublin Street, close to the Liv­er­pool docks. It turned out this was a for­tu­itous move as Mec­ca­no closed in Octo­ber that year.

Mec­ca­no pro­vid­ed me a mem­o­rable and enjoy­able first 17 years of employ­ment, where the skills I learned proved invalu­able for the remain­der of my work­ing career:

• 1981
  Moved to Hamp­shire to join IBM UK Lab­o­ra­to­ries Ltd. as a Senior Mold Design­er.
• 1994
  Took up the post of Senior Pro­duc­tion Engi­neer at Ken­wood Domes­tic Appli­ances in Havant.
• 1998
  Joined Nokia UK Devel­op­ment Lab­o­ra­to­ries in Farn­bor­ough as a Tool­ing Spe­cial­ist, where I stayed until retir­ing in 2009.