The perfect present for a car obsessed 10 year old!
When your husband builds Lewis Hamilton and Valterri Bottas’ race cars, it’s no surprise that our household are F1 fans!
Truth be told, Callum spends every single race weekend watching the race with Daddy, and is able to name pretty much every single team and their drivers. Not bad for just 7 years old. So when Spin Master sent him the Meccano Ferrari SF71H to test out, he quite literally jumped at the chance. His words when seeing it ‘oh my goodness, Christmas has come early!!’
Now, it is aimed at those aged over 10 years, so Callum did need a bit of help, so we settled down over the course of 2 afternoons for the big build.
This clever piece of kit is a set within the Engineering and Robotics series, and I’ve already been told by Callum that he wants to buy some more of the series!
Having never built a Meccano set before, this was a new experience for me. Comprising of an instruction booklet that gives step by step instructions as well as pictures of the screws to scale to make things easier. It also comes with the necessary tools and the metal and plastic parts (362 in total), as well as a sticker sheet, and it looked really good on first opening.
Callum couldn’t wait to get started, and opened the various bags to find the right parts for the first stages. We worked together as a team to build the initial chassis, as it’s a little fiddly for little fingers. He did a great job though, and it wasn’t long before the car started to take shape.
I have to say, having a detailed instruction booklet really did help and describes well the various stages you need to complete before moving on to the next part.
We learned early on that it’s so important to make sure that you tighten the screws and nuts properly with the spanner and screwdriver that come with the kit, otherwise things start to spin and make it much more difficult to build. Don’t let this put you off though, it’s clearly a novice mistake to make, and we won’t be doing that next time!
We really enjoyed watching the car transform in front of us, especially as you add the stickers through the build process.
With Mr Intolerant G being an engineer, he was intrigued to see whether we’d achieve the build without assistance, but even he was impressed with the level of detail that the kit provides.
It tested our patience (read mine!) as I’m simply not used to doing anything like this, but I’m really proud that the little dude and I managed to do it without asking for any help. And Callum was so pleased with the end result, rushing off to show Mr Intolerant G immediately!
We enjoyed ourselves so much, and had a wonderful time working together as a team to complete the car. My only criticism is that it was quite hard at times to find the right parts as they are not bagged as you would expect whilst working through the booklet. It seems to be quite a random process. And for someone not used to this, it can be tricky to find what you need to start off with.
Overall, it was a great experience, and one I’m really grateful to Spin Master for giving us. And it would certainly make the perfect birthday or Christmas present for any 10 year old, or in fact any big kid too!
Callum has now placed it on a shelf in his room in pride of place, and has been telling everyone about the project of building it!
(NB: Spin Master kindly sent us the Meccano Ferrari, all comments are my own)