The Great K'nex
James is one of those boys that loves to build models, no matter what it is out of! So when we got the chance to take part in the Great K'nex event we jumped at the chance!
For this review James was sent K'nex Rad Rides £13 and K'nex Battle Bow £24.99. He was thrilled when he saw the Battle Bow set as he had recently done an archery session with his Cubs and he had been asking for an archery set for his birthday (its not till August!)
The first set we built was the Rad Rides. Mummy had wanted to do the Battle Bow, but James wanted to do that one when he had his teacher training day from school! The Rad Rides set contains over 200 pieces and the pieces and be mixed to make up to 12 different vehicles.
First thing we did was decide which of the cars we were going to build. The kit consists of two bags of parts and a instruction booklet. This kit is aimed at 7 to 12 year olds, James is almost 9, so he is in middle of the age bracket!
You are given instructions for one of the twelve models, with a code to log onto the K'nex website for instructions for other eleven. After looking at the designs, James decided he wanted to build the three wheeler car from the website.
The first thing we need to do was open the packand separate all the parts. James delegated this job to mummy while he had an after school snack! When ever we are building any models we use a white tea towel to place all the parts on, as we have quite a dark carpet and we didn't want to loose any of the small parts, especially the black ones!
At first we thought we were going okay as we got the first bit built, we then realised that the instructions had some bits coloured wrong, so we had to look at the shape instead of the colour.
The next bit that we found a bit tricky, was attaching the little orange bits that were clipped onto the yellow bits, James had tonshout for daddy at this point as mummy was getting a bit annoyed with it. Luckily once we had a fresh set of eyes look at it, we knew what we were doing and we got it all clipped into the right place!
Even thought we had a few issues with the build it was so much fun! It was nice to spend some one on one time with James doing something that he enjoyed without Freddie trying to help!
K'nex Battle Bow
Next it was onto the Battle Bow set. We decided to do this on the day James has a teacher training day from school, as it would give us more time to make it and for James to enjoy it, rather than rushing because we had other stuff on.
This set was so much fun to build and we actually found it much easier than the Rad Ride! We literally had this built in around half an hour.
Once we had all the parts sorted out, the instructions were pretty easy to follow. There was a couple of instances where the colour was marked wrong, ie parts were green but instructions said they were black, but over all that didn't really make a difference it was still really easy and quick to build!
As you can see from the pictures below, the bow took shape pretty quickly. It really did take us less than half an hour to build, even with Freddie sat on the sofa offering his opinion on how we should build it every few minutes!
**We were sent these kits free of charge in exchange for this review, all words and pictures are our own**
