Hiya,
Does anyone have a round number for Model Engineers (with a Railway
bent) in the UK? I'm doing a Business plan for something for the
fraternity.
Thank,
Rob.
The circulation figures for ME & EiM would be a start, though it would not
include the browsers and borrowers?
Survey are difficult, only a minority reply.
Likewise clubs, my father and grandfather where both keen model engineers
(G'Dad had a 5" gauge track in the garden), yet neither were members of
clubs and only occasional magazine buyers.
Are you including those who built their own 'G scale' (loose term I know)
locos? Probably not regular readers of ME or EiM.
mh
Curious - did they work EVERYTHING out from first principles
(impressive) or did they buy books (since you state they
were only "occasional magazine buyer")
BugBear
Sorry for the rather 'curt' description.
Both were engineers by profession, so that helped on the practical side.
What I meant was 'occasional magazine buyers' was that they only bought
magazines and books occasionally at present, the researcher was
directed to current circulation figures, on which neither would appear. Dad
especially was brought you reading LBSC's articles (indeed he met him
at least once) in the ME and English Mechanics and would regularly drive
locos on the garden track and on the Romford Club track from an early age.
It's also worth remembering that generations before mine seem to have been
taught much more about steam and indeed mechanics in general at school.
You could give both Dad and G'Dad a set of drawings and they could have
produced the engine.
I poersonally have no great interest in steam locos, but I think I could
built a simple oscillating engine from scratch, I understand the general
principles
and to be honest it's not rocket science.
My point was that there are people who will be beneath the 'model engineer'
radar.
mh
Looking at some 1940's ME magazines, there was a fair bit of stuff around, but
nowhere near the stage that we are at today, with almost everything available at
the click of a mouse and the flash of the plastic.
I'm thinking of one article, about a guy who built some amazing models,
including loco's, and he had passed away and his engines had gone to a musuem?
Might have been Gloucestershire way.
He certainly didn't have drawings for what he made, just what he saw and
sketched presumably.
Peter
--
Peter A Forbes
Prepair Ltd, Rushden, UK
snipped-for-privacy@prepair.co.uk
Given that Railway Modeller has an audited circulation of 43K and
Model Rail has 29K it's going to be well south of those figures.
20K rings a bell but how many ME/MEW readers aren't into trains? Maybe
as much as half.
And from the traffic stats to Homeworkshop.org.uk I'd guess that only
1 in 5 are digitally literate to any large degree.
Charles
I wonder what the phrase is that is used by Rocket Scientists when they
wish to disdainfully dismiss something as being technically trivial?
"It's not like creating the world in 6 days, you know.", perhaps?
If you are inferring that the other 4 in 5 of us do not even achieve
mere digital literacy then the majority of us are doomed to t'internet
oblivion? But this could be a plus.
Alan
I was discussing a boiler design for my neighbours proposed loco and the
phrase "It's not rocket science" was mentioned but I countered that at
one time it was, as it was cutting edge technology. Nowadays steam is
well understood so not rocket science anymore. I recently attended a
talk by Richard Gibbon OBE at the Bristol SMEE about the Great Britain
engine replacements and that brought home the rapid pace of steam
technology in those days.
That came out wrong - actually rocket science itself is mostly fairly
easy, it's rocket plumbing that's hard.
You need to be able to use Naperian exponentials ("e"), and to some
extent understand them, to understand the basic rocket equation; but
that isn't hard to do.
Learning to use them takes two sentences; the level of understanding
needed takes a couple of pages study and a night's sleep.
The perceived hardness is mostly because "e" isn't part of most people's
math vocabulary - and this is mainly because it isn't taught at "O"
level math, where IMO it should be taught.
Instead they go on about algebraic combinations of trig functions, and
differentiation/integration of algebraic formulae - which are all pretty
useless for most of us, and can be done in MATLAB or whatever without
any need to understand the details anyway.
Or at least it were like that when I were a lad.
Rocket plumbing, on the other hand, is by comparison really complicated.
Getting things to flow where and how you want them to is hard, even
without getting into computational fluid dynamics etc.
-- Peter Fairbrother
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