MEW 319 - Roofing A Shed??????

MiM is also on there, even if you can't read the German you can look at the pictures.

I started taking MEW after being gifted a large number of earlier issues. I must admit that the content of the last year or so magazines is not up to the standard of the older issues.

I don't have an axe to grind, but I shall seriously consider if the subscription is worth renewing when the time comes.

Andrew.

That's good to know - I think I've made my mind up about renewing my subscription now!

Iain

Trouble is, if too many start cancelling or finding free on-line routes, for whatever their reasons, it could ultimately push the cost of these already expensive magazines up, leading to....

Trouble is, if there's very little relevant content in the "already expensive magazines".........

Readly is a subscription service - it isn't free!

£9.99 per month but you have access to almost every printed magazine Worldwide plus a large selection of newspapers!

MEW must have been added relatively recently as it wasn't available last time I looked - however both MEW and ME are there now!

Peter

"We all have a book in us".

I imagine every single person who has commented on this thread has a good level of knowledge on one subjet at least that they could share in a model engineering magazine article. Our hobby is dwindling, so the pool of authors is getting smaller. We can all do our bit by offering our skills for a few quid.

I've lost a few really interesting model engineer friends over the past few years. I wish I could chat with them again and enjoy the benefit of their experience. If anyone wishes their legacy to be helping out other model engineers with their expertise, this is a win/win opportunity to do so and support the magazines which, if the posts above are to be believed, are starting to struggle for content.

I thought the article was excellent. So much that I am going to donate all my money to keep this forum free.

Bye.

JA

I must admit I missed all the content complained about; I only skimmed the bevel gear CNC article to see if i could learn anything from it, as in the past I have CNC machined bevel gears. Still, I suppose an article about roofing a shed is better than one about a shed shedding a roof.

The stock answer to those who complain is to write an article for publication and enlighten us. I have written articles for ME and MEW, athough nothing recent for a variety of reasons.

So the challenge for Peter Bryce and Iain Hogg is to put pen to paper!

Andrew

It's easier to complain than help I guess. These magazines are a product of our hobby, a very niche little subject. We are standing idle in a sinking rowboat complaining that no-one else is bailing out the water.

I know it's not at the same level of readership, but when I was editor of a local car club newsletter the hardest part of the job was filling the pages, until I came up with a cunning plan . When I attended a get together I would make a bee-line for a club member with a camera. I would then ask them nicely if they would write an article for the club. 99% did. Most of them worried about their spelling or grammar. Not my strong point either, but my co-editor being a retired teacher could handle that part easily. I think they enjoyed the experience. My level of expertise in any of the fields required for an article to get published is almost zero.

That's one of the reasons why I've long argued that we should lose the 'model' part of the title! It does nobody any good and leads to stupid arguments about what is and isn't 'model engineering'.

My success rate was far lower! And we couldn't get anything from the club chairman, so I went with the piss take that my co-editor knocked up to fill the space while we waited. After three years, we'd had him as a spy, ballet dancer and a number of other daft ideas.

Another actual contributor complained that I wasn't supposed to change anything after I had corrected her spelling and added some more punctuation - just three full stops in 2000 words made my eyes bleed, although having to read her tiny handwriting with a magnifying glass didn't help.

I've never bought a magazine where every article was something I absolutely had to read. Just like this forum, the most interesting stuff has always been on unexpected topics and the 'model' part of both MEW and ME is of very little interest to me.

Being brutally honest, it is not really fair to blame the publishers of a hobby magazine for sparse contents (I refuse "content" !) if the problem is too few contributions.

That is so whether a commercial "glossy" like ME and MEW; or a club newsletter - but I am rather biased. Although never a professional writer I have had letters published in ME, helped write two or three papers for the British Cave Research Association's Transactions; and years back I did time as editor of two, separate, caving-clubs' "Journals". Sounds fancier than "Newsletter".

A notable feature about the last, and this may be paralleled for some model-engineering club magazine writers and editors, was the effect of putting a lot of effort into the latter club's publication's appearance.

I was the first, and it eventually transpired last, of its volunteer editors to have used physical copy-and-paste techniques, and though unable to use photographs, those methods lifted the look of the Wessex Cave Club Journal over four 1980s years from rather staid to a style that helped encourage even more very good articles - it always had those. I did have an Amstrad PCW9512 for the text (and even used it for a book mss); but my successor could go much further technically, helping the magazine become a high-grade DTP creation rich in photos, the cover ones in colour, on its glossy paper.

Now, a commercial magazine can give us all the looks and more in shovels full, using professional techniques and skills few hobby clubs are likely to have. Yet for both commercial and amateur specialist magazines written largely by readers, looks are still only part of the story. They still need good, varied contributions from readers, and a plentiful supply and variety usually attract more articles - and about the publication's main subject..

It seems that as if the magazine is perceived as worth writing for, more people will write for it. I think good appearance without going too far suggests the publishers respect the writers' work, while worthwhile material is its own attractant.

'

Complaints about "our" magazines are not new. I have met those who say "There's nothing in Model Engineer", meaning there is, but they see it as mainly long serials about how to build things they are not building themselves.

Maybe so, but I sometimes glean information useful more generally. On the other hand, reading how someone milled some detail of very high-grade project will not necessarily teach us much about milling than is available more easily in the Workshop Series and similar reference-books. Besides, those accounts apply to the builder's own skills, machine-tools and accessories not necessarily duplicated in our own.

'

Cost will be a big factor of course, especially and sharply now, with everything else; with a fiver a fortnight shop price for ME. (I think MEW is similar). With cost comes value - is your year's stack of magazines more valuable to you than your Workshop Series collection (10, in mine); irrespective of which cost more to accumulate? (Or the two books on machining, that keep popping up right next to this panel, in the ARC ad...)

'

In recent times, ME has improved with the historical articles, museum reviews and the like; and I do approve of the policy of separating all the trade ads from the articles.

However, if in the end we might feel we don't get what we pay for; we won't if not enough of us write at least letters or short articles, not just the long constructional serials.

It's up to us, really!

Edited By Nigel Graham 2 on 19/08/2022 00:10:33

I agree, very little modelling is done in my workshop, most of the work I do is general repair & modification of obsolete stuff, daft things like a hot tub pump £500 + to replace & no parts available modified to take an Ebay wet end and back in action for £80, door lock plates for my mate XK jag, and on the back burner a spline adapter for an obsolete Selva propeller shaft. I haven't bought MEW for a long time, I tend to surf forums and Websites for interesting material. The problem is you can't please everyone but a wider spread might be better.

The very first edition of MEW opened with an editorial which included the line ‘the magazine exists to concentrate primarily on workshops and their use’ and surely an article on the repair of the roof of a workshop comes under this heading?

There is a long tradition of articles in ME and MEW which spun off from it on workshop buildings and their construction – indeed in 1905 H.Muncaster of steam engine fame wrote a series of articles on the subject.

I suspect that there are two reasons for this thread – firstly the article was not needed at this point by many readers although perhaps more might find it a useful reference and secondly there were undoubtably people upset that other subjects have not appeared because this one took up space – although like my fellow newsletter editors who have already commented sometimes it virtually takes red hot pincers and cattle prods to extract work from authors to have the variety of articles one might like!

Another thought is that some may consider this article an aberration as nothing like it has appeared recently – but surely that is absolutely the point – it is a topic of use/interest occasionally but not every issue or even every year.

Finally I can only add to the comments on contributing articles if you wish a subject to appear in MEW.

Sounds about my level.

More seriously, can you print out pages of magazines in general from Readly, if you want to print out say drawings etc?

Edited By Hopper on 19/08/2022 09:28:49

+1

I have written articles for both magazines over the years and actively supported the hobby in other ways. MEW was spun off ME back in the 90s ! I kept all the issues from No1 and had thought that Issue No 300 would be something special, even as an MGB fan I found it a disappointment. I stuck with it for almost a year longer before reluctantly throwing in the towel ! May be it is time for ME to reabsorb MEW ? Noel.

If the magazine goes away from Model Engineering then I will drop my subscription.

Why would it need to drop the Model in the title of either magazine that is what they were aimed at to start with if you want to fix a bike or whatever using engineering tools then find a forum or magazine for that purpose or better still start your own magazine.

That is just my personal view on it and will not get into discussions as it will not change my mind

I've been buying hobby magazines for forty years. In that time none of the more practical car/bike magazines have covered workshop engineering practice and tooling beyond we machined a new part in a friend's lathe or buy a planishing hammer to do this. MEW is the only one that does that, and the various projects are usually good demonstrations of design/tools/methods/principles. I'm far more likely to recover a shed roof than produce bevel gears on a CNC, but they're both equally interesting.