Plastic Model Kit - Level 1

My boss recently began dabbling with plastic model cars, and it kind of gave me a hankering. I wanted to see if plastic models would be a fun activity I could share with my seven year-old daughter. As a youngster I did a couple of these and had fond memories.

My daughter seemed interested in trying it, so we went to Discount Drug Mart and I told her to pick out a Level 1 kit. She narrowed it down to a purple convertible and a police car, and asked me which I thought she should select. (Secretly I'd been hoping for the police car...) I explained to her that if she enjoys the level 1 kit, we'd move on to level 2 and there were no police cars outside level one, but there were plenty of convertibles.

So we bought the 1/25 SnapTite® '05 Chevy® Impala™ Police Car Plastic Model Kit.

Here's how it went.......

This kit says it has 40+ parts. Not sure why they couldn't count them for us...

Yep. That's a shotgun between the seats!

This part was weird. The instructions said to tape the side mirrors in place and then snap the bottom on. At some point the right mirror was broken. I glued it on later.

I let my seven year-old try to do the whole thing. Since this was our first go at this, we stuck to the instructions pretty strictly. There were several spots she needed help with. (It does say 8+ on the box after all.) The SnapTite parts sometimes were cumbersome to get to, well, snap tite. Often I felt gluing would have been preferable.

A sprue cutter and file would have helped remove and touch-up the pieces. I used a utility knife, wire cutters, and sometimes I got sloppy and just twisted pieces off the sprue. Again, the method for putting on the side mirrors was sloppy and one broke.

Level 1 was easy. The end product was more toy-like in appearance than replica. It might be fun to re-do this kit with a nice paint job. 

She says she wants to try a Level 2 kit next.........