Single oscillating vertical steam engine (Bing)
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Single oscillating vertical steam engine (Bing) |
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A single oscillating vertical steam engine, made by Bing in Germany, circa 1921.
A black upright stovepipe-chimneyed boiler with a single flywheel and piston arrangement towards the back, this basic configuration also appears in the design for the later "Polly" model steam engine.
Bing produced a lot of these upright steam engines in a surprising number of size variations, for some years.
Bing and Meccano Limited
The very first Meccano stationary steam engines circa 1914, which were also simple cylindrical engines with a cast-iron base, are widely reckoned to have been built for Meccano Ltd by Bing, as the Meccano units look like obvious clones of items from the Bing range (which themselves looked almost identical to each other apart from size).
However, Meccano produced their own version of the upright steam engine (badged "MLdL") after World War One, and the rather generic nature of the design and construction, and the habit of the big German companies of copying each others' more generic designs, coupled with the loss of German intellectual property rights after the War (which meant that even quite distinctive pre-War designs could be copied) have rather muddied the waters when it comes to trying to work out who actually manufactured some of these pieces.
See also:
- Meccano Steam Engine, 1929 (Meccano Ltd) – a later non-Bing Meccano engine
External links
- Bing vertical steam engines (historytoy.com)
- Toy Steam Engines, Meccano 1914 (mikes-steam-engines.co.uk)
- Bing vertical steam engine (and Meccano) (modelsteam.myfreeforum.org)
- Classic Models: Tubal Caine's "Polly" single vertical oscillating steam engine (modelengineeringwebsite.com)
