Mamod
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| Private | |
| Industry | Toys |
| Founded | 1937 |
| Founder | Geoffrey Malins |
| Headquarters | Smethwick, Warley (SInce 1992), UK |
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Area served
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Worldwide |
| Products | Toy steam engines |
| Website | mamod.co.uk |
Mamod is a British toy manufacturer specialising in manufacturing live steam models. The company was founded in 1937 in Birmingham in the UK by Geoffrey Malins. The name is a portmanteau of 'Ma' lins 'Mod' els'. Malins started off making steam engines which were sold under the Hobbies brand name but he soon started selling them under the Mamod brand name. The first models produced were of stationary steam engines. Much later the company also began creating models of road rollers, traction engines, steam wagons and other steam road vehicles. These models were aimed at the toy market, so were simple to operate and ran at low boiler pressures for safety but were not accurate scale models.
Most Mamod models use simple but effective oscillating cylinders, usually single-acting. Some of these engines have regulators either in the steam feed or exhaust but many others run unregulated (in the simpler models) or have a simple reversing mechanism to alter the cutoff, thus controlling the power/speed and direction of the engine. Early models had single or multi-wick lamps or vapourising spirit burners but in the mid-1970s the company changed to hexamine solid fuel which came in tablet form and provided low heat in a relatively safe form.
The range has its origins in 1936 when Geoffrey Malins started to make engines for Hobbies of Dereham. His engines were loosely based on the Bowman engines that Geoffrey Bowman Jenkins had made for Hobbies until 1935. The main difference between the Bowman and the Malins was that the latter were smaller, only came on metal bases and all except the SE1 had the chimney attached to the top of the boiler, known as a locomotive style chimney. From 1937 Malins decided to make his own range of engines as well as those he was producing for Hobbies. With the exception of a few small detail changes - such as lighter shade of paints and a Mamod badge - they were almost identical to the Hobbies range. The difference between Mamod and Hobbies became somewhat blurred; a Mamod badged SE4 could be found in the 'Hobbies colours'. This was the very beginnings of a philosophy which meant that the engines had to be sold and out the door. Unsold engines meant lost profit and nothing was wasted. Any differences between the two ranges had all but disappeared by 1940.
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Wikipedia