About the Model:

I have been scratch building diggers for over 30 years, and they must work. I reconditioned all my Meccano and powder coated the lot. The result is superb and its so much nicer to build with.

I first built the Ruston 300 wheeled dragline and it worked reasonable well. The Rapiers original lever and gear system was a pain to operate by all accounts. I went for a multi motor setup. I used an ER15 for the walk drive. Two Pittman's for the slew and drag and a Powerdrive for the hoist.

I'm waiting to wire up the switches in a box, but my brother has the box down country. I was going to build a bucket from brass, I even made a card development, but I bought a load of old Meccano so I built a bucket and sprayed it satin black, a more suitable colour all round. At least when it get's scratched I'll be able to respray it. I did use a finer chain for the drag chains as Meccano chain is hopeless. I did use some heavy duty brass gears in the walking systems, I think I got them from Dave Taylor.

Because I did not use the standard slew gearing, I found the model exhibited some strange hunting whilst slewing, it was a combination of speed, inertia and backlash. So I made a friction damper on the main slew gear. Its not perfect but it looked good swinging a full bucket, with dirt cascading out the back of the bucket.