'Steel Tec' was distributed by Remco Toys, Inc. of New
York, NY, during the period 1992 - 1996 or1997. Remco Toys
is a Division of parent company Azrak-Hamway International,
Inc.,
In 1993 Meccano brought a civil action against Remco for
claiming 'that Steel Tec was compatible with Meccano'.
Meccano won the suit and the 'compatibility statement' had
to be removed from the Steel Tec boxes. Details of this
action are bound by a gag order for 7 years. That's until
October 2000, so stay tuned. There was, however a short
report published in the Canadian MeccaNotes written by
expert witness for Meccano, Lou Boselli, as follows:
"Most readers may not be familiar with this new
system [Steel Tec] which recently appeared
on the U.S. market. It is manufactured in China and
while the range of parts is very limited the
distributors claimed that it was compatible with
Meccano. It isn't and that was their downfall.
Meccano took legal action, requested and received a
restraining order thereby stopping all sales of the
product while the case proceeded. I was assigned
the task of mixing the parts of the two systems and
then to attempt to build models from the mixture.
This served proved [sic] that the clone was
not compatible with Meccano but even with this
evidence I was still grilled for six hours on the
witness stand. I will be filing a complete story in
a future issue but it shows just how popular
Meccano has become. Just when was the last time
Meccano even had the opportunity to seek legal
action to protect its name and product?" [No
further report was forthcoming. Presumably the gag
order intervened.]
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In February 1996 Remco were slapped with a charge of
'deceptive and misleading TV advertising' by the Federal
Trade Commission. The FTC said the TV ads showed Steel Tec
model cars and airplanes performing movements that the
models didn't actualy have the capability of carrying out.
The FTC also said that some sets indicated they could make 9
or more models but didn't add that you had to dismantle one
model before starting another. Although these charges may
appear to the average person to be rather tame, Remco were
howwever instructed for the next six months, to give a full
cash refund to any purchaser who returned the set and 'felt
they had been misled' by the TV ads.
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