[baggsie]

I'm not surprised (albeit slightly saddened) - I bought my 6 year old boy the set pictured and the quality it terrible - it's plastic and the tolerances are so bad the nuts can never be done up to any tightness before slipping. The instructions were also akin to a crappy toy you'd buy off AliExpress.

[janoc]

Don't buy cheap plasticky Chinese copies. Buy Czech Merkur instead:

https://merkurtoys.cz/

Merkur is about as old as Meccano and Erector and boys from the former Eastern Bloc are most likely very familiar with it.

[samsk]

Fun fact: Merkur was used to build world first machine for casting soft contact lenses :)

[Luc]

It's a great story. Picture here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Wichterle

By late 1961 Wichterle succeeded in producing the first four hydrogel contact lenses on a home-made apparatus built using a children's building kit (Merkur), a bicycle dynamo belonging to one of his sons, and a bell transformer. Wichterle also made all the moulds and glass tubing needed to dose them with monomer. On Christmas afternoon, with the help of his wife Linda, using the machine on his kitchen table, Wichterle finally succeeded. He tried the lenses in his own eyes and although they were the wrong power they were comfortable. Thus, he invented a new way of manufacturing the lenses using a centrifugal casting procedure. A few days later, he completed his patent application and produced over 100 lenses by spin casting. He built several new prototype machines using Merkur toys with increasing numbers of spindles which required the stronger motor taken from his gramophone. With these rudimentary devices, in the first four months of 1962, Wichterle and Linda made 5,500 lenses.

[timeon]

I used my old set recently when I quickly had to hack construction for grow-lamps.

[GordonS]

I loved Meccano as a boy, and bought some for my son last Christmas - what a huge disappointment! As you said, it's plastic now instead of metal, and not even good quality plastic. It flexes too much, and soon showed white stress marks. Difficult or impossible to tighten things properly, one piece comes loose as you're tightening another.

Also, yes, the instructions for their building ideas were crap by comparison with Lego's.

I'm 100% certain it was a legitimate Meccano set, as we bought it at a brick and mortar toy store, not Amazon.

We stuck to Lego after that.

[fovc]

Did you buy it on Amazon by any chance? I had this issue with another branded toy and it turned out to be a knockoff

[baggsie]

Nope - Joué Club (a toy store chain in France).