Model Engineer & Workshop

[Tony Watson 3Participant @tonywatson3]

I’m sitting here looking at the full run of ME from 1898 and of MEW from 1990 sitting on my bookshelves.  I’ve also decided not to renew my current subscription.

I can only fall back on that old adage – ‘If you can’t say something good about something say nothing’…..

[noel shelleyParticipant @noelshelley55608]

Hi Tony, I also have a large collection of ME ! I renew now more out of loyalty and that by supporting it I will help it continue – but I’m no longer sure why ? Who cares ? Noel.

[Trevor Drabble 1Participant @trevordrabble1]

I also used to subscribe , but then dropped to  maybe 4/5 issues p.a. but then , after repeatedly travelling the considerable distance to my local WHS (as was ) ,  and failing to obtain any copies I contacted the publishers asking for a publication date in order to improve my chances , and was told they didn’t have a publication date but that I could order individual copies direct . Since I preferred to make any choices based on looking at the articles before purchase , I therefore decided not to bother. It seems to me that they are really only interested in electronic copies , which isn’t for me , hence yet another regrettable drop in paper copies of the magazine.

[Andrew CrowParticipant @andrewcrow91475]

Like you Noel, I continue with my subscription to hopefully keep the magazine going in the hope that it might inspire more younger people to get involved, although I think in the longer term it may become an on line publication only.

By supporting the magazine we also keep this forum going.

Andy.

[Robert ButlerParticipant @robertbutler92161]

Many years ago I purchased ME regularly but found the workshop items were my sole reason for buying the magazine and decided this was no longer worthwhile. That is not to detract from the highly skilled and dedicated model engineer contributors.

i discovered MEW shortly after the first issue and purchased every copy having the full set. However MEW for the last few years was falling short compared to earlier issues and I was intending to stop buying the magazine. When M E & W replaced both publications I deferred my decision.

M E & W now is much as M E used to be and there is insufficient content of interest to me and so it is highly likely i will purchase for much longer.

Robert Butler

 

[Clive FosterParticipant @clivefoster55965]

Similarly to Andy my primary reason for keeping my subscription going is to retain access to the forum.

Like Tony I have a complete set of MEW and a significant ME collection, only back to 1964 tho’. I think a fall off of interest by long term subscribers is inevitable due mostly to steadily increasing personal experience and inevitable changes of interests over the years. In the beginning all is new with plenty to learn so a considerable regular novelty helps retain interest well beyond what you actually intend to do or use. Years also add to the personal stock of things. Having bought or built a satisfactory widget inevitable repetition of “useful things” means the fourth or fifth edition is just wasted space.

My minimum criteria for subscription for the last few years has been an average of one article per month of sufficient interest to go on the might re-read, might make or might steal bits from piles. Not been met for the last half decade, or maybe longer, but one or two stand-outs have just tipped the scales. Decided to give it another couple of years post amalgamation before a final decision.

I’m a widget person, working primarily in 12 inch to the foot scale, rather than model person which doesn’t help the editors job. Model folk inevitably have more interest in a well executed model, or for that matter clock, than I would.

Really ought to try and do something with the 6 or so half started articles living in the computer memory.

Clive

[John HaineParticipant @johnhaine32865]

It’s worth checking if your library has digital access via (for example) the Libby platform, and subscribes to ME&W.  The Cambridge one does and I scan each issue as it becomes available.  Over the last 18 months or so nothing has interested me enough to read any of the articles. My impression is that ME ate MEW and is becoming even more repetitive and boring. This forum has more of interest but has noticeably declined in posting frequency over the last year or so.

[Andrew TinsleyParticipant @andrewtinsley63637]

I subscribe to ME&W primarily to support the forum, but even that has declined in my opinion. Frankly there is very little that interests me in the magazine. A lot of it seems to be padding. The odd page or two showing stuff from 60 years ago and in the latest issue a large article on a Tank display at the Tank Museum, really put me off.

Early issues of MEW were full of interesting stuff, not so anymore. My subscription renewal is looking doubtful.

Andrew.

 

[File HandleParticipant @filehandle]

I used to buy regularly from WH Smiths, but recently I look and see if anything is of interest, typically not.

Today I decided to buy a book by Tubal Cain, thinking T would only get it online checked, found could do it via local bookshop, saved postage and they said I would be able to collect tomorrow lunchtime’ So quicker and cheaper.

Both the book and postage were more expensive from Jones (ex Smiths) so not surprised they are closing, but their loss will probably mean loss of sales for MEW & ME.

[duncan webster 1Participant @duncanwebster1]

The vast majority if articles in ME and it’s offshoots are written by its readers, if we don’t contribute there is nothing to publish. I used to have a collection of ME going back to 1950, I decided that the attic wouldn’t take any more weight and set to scanning interesting articles. Even that far back there were years where I didn’t scan anything. I have previously suggested that Mr Editor should get copies of model engineering mags from other English speaking countries and see if there is anything he could scrounge. Bit difficult to translate from eg German

Part of the problem is that in days of old if you wanted a model loco you had to make one, that generation of makers is dying off and so there are loads of second hand locos available

[Tony Watson 3Participant @tonywatson3]

That’s the word I was looking for – padding!

[BazParticipant @baz89810]

Like Duncan I had ME magazines going back I think to the mid thirties and during Covid I disposed of them all, space and weight being the main reasons, also the local club had a full library so anything I needed in future I could find in the club library, until the committee decided to decorate and the room was gutted, knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing the complete library was chucked in a skip. Not only was a mine of information lost but without them all around the walls the clubhouse echoes terribly, like walking into a brand new empty house, this has stopped a couple of members attending meetings because it affects their hearing aids. I used to buy Model engineer from WH Smith’s until the branch closed, we don’t have a newsagent who will stock it so I had to take a subscription out, I don’t think I will be renewing this year because there is nothing that interests me, and as others have said a lot of padding. Between poor content and the fact that Royal Mail only seem to deliver every other copy, and when they do deliver it is a couple of weeks late, we only seem to get post once every ten days, I live in a large town in the north of Hampshire UK. I did purchase a CD of Model Engineer mags, not from the long river, the other place and although they claim to be from 1901 or thereabouts to present day, there are blocks of ten and twenty years missing and lots of odd ones here and there. Sorry to have gone off topic a bit, a lot !

[John Haine]

On John Haine Said:

My impression is that ME ate MEW

To my mind, your impression is a reasonably decent reflection of reality, sad to say.

[duncan webster 1]

On duncan webster 1 Said:

The vast majority if articles in ME and it’s offshoots are written by its readers, if we don’t contribute there is nothing to publish.

That would be a reasonable argument for those complaining about a free parish magazine.

The readers of Model Engineering and Workshop are paying actual money for the magazine.  They have every right to complain about the quality of the product they’re buying, without having to contribute to its production.

To be fair, on a practical note, as opposed to a moral one, you do make a fair point.  There isn’t a ready cadre of journalists with machining or metalworking experience in a home workshop.

Thanks to short-sighted policies of the past (from parties of any and all flavour), there are few enough subjects of His Majesty these days with any experience of machining and metalwork, anywhere.

This hasn’t been helped by a rejection of any kind of engineering as a pass-time in UK culture.  Go watch The Repair Shop,  it feels dominated by “craft” skills, like woodworking, needlework, leatherwork, and the likes.  Yeah, there’s the odd bit of metalwork, but even that is more often “craft” type metalwork.

I dropped off some donations of a bunch of brazed carbide lathe tools that were just too big for my 9×20, but ideal for their Chipmaster (not that it gets used much), and the chap who took my crate of tooling said

“Thank you, I’m sure Dick will appreciate these.  I’m a woodworker myself.  Wood has soul, y’see.”

I just smiled and left, and chose not to point out that without the ‘soulless’ metal, he’d be doing his woodworking with flint tools.

That kind of hippie, irrational, utterly misconceived nonsense, pervades our society and in combination with the lack of exposure to manufacturing and engineering in the UK means that the potential pool of authors is lower in number than it would have been, and those that exist would typically be of an age to be considering ensuring their affairs are in order.

I just don’t think there’s a feasible solution to these problems for regular printed media aimed at home machinists.

If Model Engineering and Workshop is still being printed in 10 years, I would be very surprised.

As for the diminishing of this forum, I would suggest members swallow their (entirely sensible and understandable, I’ll grant 😄) distaste for our vulgar American cousins, and consider taking a look at Hobby Machinist Forum, as an adjunct to membership here.

Yes, Americans can’t spell important words properly, have very peculiar views about lots of things, definitely don’t appreciate their luck in having workshops that we would consider wildly spacious, but they consider a little cramped, and most annoyingly, often insist that they invented everything (although, galling as it is to admit, the US has often led the world in machine tool and tooling innovation).

However, Hobby Machinist Forum is a very friendly place, with sensible moderation (similar to here, maybe a little more proactive) and a very appreciable resource of skill and knowledge in their membership.  Oh and there are enough Canadians on there to dilute the Americans! 😉

I have learned an awful lot from that forum (yes, more than a deep sadness that McMaster Carr will not ship across the Atlantic) and being exposed to  American perspectives on hobby machining, has definitely broadened my mind.

[John HaineParticipant @johnhaine32865]

Also interesting to compare the “member forum” on the BHI website with the NAWCC (American sort of equivalent) one. The BHI forum has had maybe a dozen new threads started so far this year. The NAWCC forum probably gets that many in a day. Admittedly the NAWCC membership is larger but they don’t restrict forum access to members (though you have to register), and it’s a much livelier organisation.  Interesting that they appointed a British chap as their new exec director 2 or 3 years back and he has made a big difference.

[PippinParticipant @phillspowart84010]

I’ve actually found ME&W has been quite an improvement on ME. The technical articles (hydraulic transmission, history of drills etc) were very interesting, and I don’t mind a bit of general interest in odd issues such as the tank day. Only thing I particularly didn’t like was the obviously AI generated christmas story, which was dreadful. Though marginally less waffle than Butterside Down!

I’m hoping to start running a series in the next year or so, so I hope the magazine keeps going for a little longer.

One thing that won’t help is the new Kelsey contract. It has a clause saying that you sign over all rights to everything you submit that gets published-which would appear to rule out your being able to put out a book, say, or revisit the design, or use bits of it in other designs. If they want full rights to original designs, drawings, build notes, etc etc, they will have to pay a damn sight more than they do! Previously you gave them a licence to publish the material once, with adaptations as they see fit.

[bernard towersParticipant @bernardtowers37738]

If your last paragraph is correct I think that could be the death knell of the magazine as we know it

[JasonBModerator @jasonb]

I’ve asked Neil to conform if that is what the Kelsey terms are. I would have thought he would have let existing authors know of such a significant change.

[PippinParticipant @phillspowart84010]

Apparently it only applies to new contributors

[BazyleParticipant @bazyle]

If anyone on here hasn’t seen a copy of the reincarnation ME&W I suggest you have a look. It is doing well at getting rid of the junk articles that plagued the end of ME, with just the occasional slip.
Somewhere I have a few copies of the Australian equivalent magazine which I recall is very similar to ME&W and ME of old and I wonder if they have a forum.
The American equivalent of both magazine and forum is Home Shop Machinist. I’ve not seen the magazine but the forum can be a very interesting diversion and has a number of this forum’s members posting. It has little about making steam locos though participants are doing that but I find it an interesting insight to people with big workshops and big lathes.
I assume some other European countries have equivalents as we know they all have substantial industrial heritage like us.

Perhaps a positive effort by Kelsey to reprint articles from these other magazines would be better than some of the marginal home grown contributions.

[PippinParticipant @phillspowart84010]

There is still a fair sized interest in machining. I’m a member of Nottingham Hackspace, which is a combination of communal workshop and social club (amongst other things), it has a machine shop that gets a fair bit of use. Most users aren’t “classically trained” either, they come at it from more of a computer nerd background. One lad has been doing some interesting work with guilloche designs using a CNC router as a shaper-work that covers both the physical machine, and the computer programming to generate traditional patterns.

Machining is also quite popular on youtube-I posted the Toolroom Takeover series last month on here. Point is, there’s still a market for a “making things” magazine, it’s just how you get them to notice ME&W.

[southernchapParticipant @southernchap]

It is doing well at getting rid of the junk articles that plagued the end of ME

That’s the problem though.  It’s fine for ME readers, like yourself, who now get all the stuff they wanted to see in their old magazine, plus a few bonus workshop techniques articles.

Those that read the old MEW, bought it (in preference to ME) because it was focused on workshop techniques articles and not dominated by stuff about Choo-choos.

Eh, sales were clearly suffering on both sides of the fence, and the new owners must have decided that the readers of ME were a better punt than the readers of MEW; fair enough, they have the data, I don’t (short term thinking mind you, as I suspect the sales of ME will likely decline due to…um…well, let’s call it ‘natural wastage’).

In any case, those of us not primarily interested in a faithful scale recreation of a 1950’s travelling coal fire (albeit with, I’ll grant, a fascinating set of mechanisms), we’re not well served with the move to Model Engineer and “Whatever”(we can find).

[JasonBModerator @jasonb]

I suppose Neil has bassed his proportions of content on what came back from the questionair. Which would seem a bit different to the postings here at the time and the fact ME was not the best seller of the two titles.

Looking at a couple of issues the difference may not be as large as the picture being posted in this thread. Taking out a couple of subjects that could go in either title, postbag and on the wire and counting the pages that are obviously ME or MEW I get the following

4470 – 25.5 pages ME, 23.5 pages MEW

4473 – 22.5 pages ME, 25 pages MEW

4480 – 26 pages ME, 19 Pages MEW.

If you take out the 5 pages of Silvercrest tipping the balance but as they are also paying for a whole page advert that no doubt gets their content into the mag then the balance is fairly equal.

 

[Neil WyattModerator @neilwyatt]

There are two big issues raised here that I ought to address. This post looks at the contract.

The new contract is, I feel, not ideal. It’s meant for commissioning an article in advance as a piece of work for a publication that they can then syndicate or use in other ways.

Very few magazines are like MEW and carry content that is often republished elsewhere. The main impact is on drawings as most people have alternative photos and most people will rewrite their text to better suit a book etc. Drawings are moot though as many will be redrawn for publication in most cases so the authors original isn’t published.

Note that the new contract only applies to new authors; the publishers are quite happy to honour the prior contracts of existing authors.

I suggest anyone concerned emails me direct, and I will pass on your concerns.

Thanks

Neil

[Neil WyattModerator @neilwyatt]

The next thing is content.

MEW had more subscribers than ME, but i did have a problem that good, practical content was starting to run a bit thin. People just aren’t writing up tool and accessory designs as much as they used to.

I now have to fit three magazines worth of content into one bigger magazine each month.

Obliviously some content overlaps, and is of interest to all readers, and some content will not appeal to all readers.

My biggest issues are:

Continuing the tradition of long series addressing complex model builds. I’m trying to get to a place where there are no more than three such lengthy series featured in each issue and no more than two of these are locomotives. To help maintain variety for all readers all long series other than Mogul will appear only in alternate issues. This means I can have more series running but they will take longer to appear.

Events. Over the summer many events happen such as IMLEC and LittleLEC, which we sponsor and MMEX at which we have a presence – these three are normally covered in depth. Many others happen from rallies to shows. I am trying to broaden out the range of events while limiting the amount of each issue dedicated to them and this will mean in future that some events that may expect to appear will only have relatively brief write ups or may be omitted. Unfortunately due to the problems with getting IMLEC to happen this year, we have to run the IMLEC and LittleLEC reports in the same issue next month. It’s not ideal but I need to clear the decks ahead of MMEX. We will try to reduce the MMEX reporting to two instead of three articles.

This content, along with Club News, may not interest all former MEW readers – I’d point out that they now have an extra 16 pages (two or three of which are adverts) so relatively little of this traditional ‘ME’ content impacts on the space available for more practical or theoretically focused articles.

I am trying very hard to make sure there is plenty of other content. I inherited a lot of good ME content that had been waiting several years to appear, most of this has now appeared – this means that going forwards readers will notice a gradual increase tooling & technique orientated content.

I’m also keen to include historic or technical articles, but trying to keep them to no more than four or five parts and making sure we don’t have too much at once and that they cover a wide range of topics.

I also want to make sure we help keep the hobby alive with articles focused on bringing people into the hobby. That’s why we linked up with Silver Crest to look at a loco kit (and the quality of kits in general seems to have greatly improved compared to a decade or two ago). Now we’re going to look at a tank kit next which is very different – tank models are an increasingly popular aspect of the hobby that has largely been ignored by ME for some reason.

From its inception the magazine was very much about new ideas and covering a huge range of different topics. My ambition is to keep up that variety. It is a truism that I can only publish what I am sent, but I am actively trying to get people to write new content on topics people want to see.

I don’t know if we will ever get there, but I’d like to be at a place where MEW and ME readers all feel broadly comfortable with the mix of content (judged as ongoing issues, not one issue in isolation), perhaps enough so that we we could even return to the simple ‘Model Engineer’ title without people fearing that the ‘workshop’ tools and techniques are being forgotten.

I am very interested in your thoughts (but even more interested in seeing offers for articles!).

Neil

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