I Lifts Me 'At To All the Grown Men Using Meccano

Meccano is a Gen X (and older) boyhood right of passage. My innocent days were that cusp of Boomer to X, the latter being how I identify, despite most picking me as a boomer. I remember a toybox under my bed, full of Lego and Meccano. My train set, a Hornby, of course, was for most of its useful life on a table that was hinged to the wall to rest on my bed posts. My dad was ingenious like that. And then we grow up... I never have, by conventional wisdom. I've had lego most of my life, still do.

So it was that my 63rd birthday was a haul of Lego and, for the first time since the 70s, Meccano. It's not an English brand, anymore, French, I think, but it's true to its roots, while well modernised and updated. So, seeing as my major public project is a robotic drum kit, and the hardest part of the design and prototyping has been figuring out how to do hi-hat control, my new Meccano's first task was to roughly model the "dual de-clutched" lever mechanism to lift the cymbals, the lower one for closing, the upper one for opening and no lifting for half position, AKA "sizzle." The final mechanism will look something like this. The clutches haven't been designed yet, but you can get an idea of how heavy duty solenoids will double their working force from 60N to 120N via mechanical advantage.

Proposed hi-hat lever mechanism, made from aluminium sheet.

It's all very good to draw a thing to make, it's another thing to see it roughed out in real space, so I got out the Meccano and some cable ties. The latter to hold one of the solenoids to the frame. It works, as this video shows...

I was confident the design in the image worked, but Meccano just confirmed it for me. Now to put the jigsaw teeth into some salvaged aluminium sheet. "Kids' toy," pfft, a workshop tool!