Too often, beautiful Steampunk things are out of stock, date, or production – and so it is with the Crazy Inventors range of Meccano sets. Meccano itself is a Victorian era company – where Mr Frank Hornby first made little bolts, nuts and metal strips for his children to make things with around the year 1898.

Far more recently, however, Meccano released the Crazy Inventors set – one with models like the one above, and including an airship model, a flying-winged car and a wooden-winged helicopter. Sounds fantastically Steampunk? I thought so – but the line has been discontinued, and it’s only in places like Ebay and other toyshops with older stock that you can now find them. Screw and Mutter (German site, Google translated) has some interesting photographs of the boxes of the set, and it seems that the helicopter set at least can still be bought from Hobbytime, and the most of the collection from Meccanoman. Looks like they went out of production around 2004 – so close, and yet…