This entertaining model of a Pachyderm (or elephant ) was originally designed by Meccano enthusiast Arup Dasgupta and published on the Internet with full building instructions in 2004. I book marked it at the time and then completely forgot about and was delighted in October 2015 to find it was still available. The basic walking mechanism was taken from a contemporary French Meccano 40-model set produced at the time Arup published his plans.  The model was great fun to build although the elephant body does involve some severe plate bending. I had some problems with the model falling over so I reverted to the original Meccano published plans for the legs I also replaced the bush wheels with the smaller 6 hole version this made the Elephant walk with a smoother action. These small modifications I found worked better than Arup’s design. He told me that when he had built it he had modified the legs because at the time he did not have the flat angled brackets used to brace the front legs. I built the model using an eclectic mixture of colours to represent the spirit of India and to add some extra bling I have used some gold parts for the construction of the howdah. (the cabin on the back of the elephant) An original picture of the real thing can be seen in the picture top right. The model has the appeal and style of an early twentieth century, German, clockwork toy. The model ambles along at a slow pace as you would expect of an elephant with the Maharajadhiraj Ruler of the universe, direct descendant of the Sun God his Royal Highness Natraj Singh ('Nutty' to friends) sitting on top in his howdah. A nice touch is the tail of the elephant waggles from side to side as it walks along. The model is driven by a modern French 3-6 volt battery motor. Click on the You Tube logo to see the model in action, this is an earlier version before I revised the design. The building instructions for Arup’s original model can be downloaded by clicking here. Page created January 21 2016 revised May 16 2016