BAYKO Instruction Manuals

This section shows, in chronological order, the various Instruction Manuals, Booklets and Leaflets which were included with BAYKO sets to help young modellers to get started. Rather surprisingly, in the thirty years or so of production, BAYKO clocked almost 60 manuals, not all different of course, though there is a progression of change throughout. If you think averaging almost two a year is excessive, what will you make of the 15 in less than 3 years, immediately after the second world war?!

The Instruction Manuals generally have up to six main functions : -

To give confidence to the adult actually making the purchase!

Introduce people to the names and descriptions of all the parts.

Provide a general "how it's done" training section.

Provide a graduated range of plans from easy to expert.

Provide other information like set contents and, sometimes, prices of sets and/or spare parts.

Fire the aspirations for a larger set!!!

The way this was done varied significantly over the years. Some documents fulfilled all the roles but sometimes BAYKO used more than one document to cover everything e.g., during the 'New Series' period just before the war, the larger conversion sets contained a number of instruction cards for further models which could only be built with the larger sets.

I'm only going to show the front cover and one other page from each manual on this page, just click on either if you want to see the entire document.

I hope you find this section useful and interesting.

I am always interested in expanding the range of documents on the site, so if you have anything that you don't see here and are happy to sell or lend it to me then I'd love to hear from you...

If you are more interested in the models included in the BAYKO Instruction Manuals, then these are analysed elsewhere...

Click on any of the thumbnail images below to move to the full manual.

Apart from the sets #20 to #23 manual and, to a lesser extent, the 'New Series' Model Cards, the printing standards were very good indeed.

There are some BAYKO collectors who believe that there were limited sales of pre-war product after the war and therefore, presumably, also of the later pre-war manuals...

...personally I think it is much more likely that everything saleable would already have been sold long before the war was over...

...though that doesn't make it impossible!

Click on any of the thumbnail images above or below to move to the full manual.

Click on any of the thumbnail images above or below to move to the full manual.

I'm afraid I haven't yet been able to lay my grubby little paws on a copy of this issue - even the date I have quoted is a guess...

I'm afraid I haven't yet been able to lay my hands on a copy of this issue either - and again the date I have quoted is a guess...

Click on any of the thumbnail images above or below to move to the full manual.

One small detail, it looks as if MECCANO redid the typesetting, possibly for every version of the manuals.

This means that there are some minor differences in the appearance of pages between the different versions, but, as far as I have been able work out, no typos!

It has to be said, that the standard of printing here is vastly superior to that of their Plimpton predecessors.

Well, that's finally that, as far as this particular section is concerned, at least for the moment!

Click on any of the thumbnail images above to move to the full manual.

Return to the Top

BACK to Previous Page

Return to the Literature Navigation Page

Return to the Main Navigation Page

Add me to your favourites