It’s review time here at The Lego Car Blog, but today’s review is not an official LEGO set. Looking like a car from LEGO’s new 8-wide Speed Champions range – only with considerably more detail – this is Brickworms’ Jaguar MkII kit, one of the many custom real-world replicas available to buy on their website.
With kits from the ‘How to Build Brick Cars’ book by Peter Blackert (one of several books available to buy at the Brickworms online store), plus other vehicles such as this classic Jaguar, aircraft and even animals, there are dozens of models to choose from. But are they any good? Read on to find out!
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Our Jaguar MkII kit arrived in a cottony drawstring bag, a neat packaging solution and one we rather like. Inside the pieces required to construct the Jag were jingling happily together, as was a paper instructions booklet, which wasn’t jingling at all.
The instructions booklet for our Jaguar was rather interesting, being printed on standard paper (not gloss), and switching the black parts for a light semi-transparent blue, as you can see below, and clear-trans for yellow. This is presumably to save on ink, but – once you get your head around blue being black – it probably makes the instructions easier to follow, as black pieces can be hard to spot. LEGO have got round this in recent years by applying all sorts of colours to the hidden parts of their sets and via their beautiful glossy instructions manuals, but the Brickworms’ approach, whilst a little odd, works pretty well.
The instructional steps themselves are clear, although more complicated than the over-simplified equivalents from LEGO, with many pieces applied at once. This is also because the Jaguar itself is more complex than LEGO’s similarly-sized Speed Champions sets, with advanced building techniques and a higher level of detail. However, we did feel a bit like Beta testers with our kit….
This is because we came across three instructional anomalies (which Brickworms will rectify), two of which you can see above. First (left) several pieces are placed side-by-side before each has to be turned over to attach a new piece. You wouldn’t find that in LEGO’s meticulously crafted steps. The second is more serious (right), where a part actually changes between one step and the next. There were two examples of this in the Jaguar’s instructions and it meant that we thought we were missing pieces until we figured out what was going on, many steps later.
Outside of these errors the Jaguar is a fun build, with some very clever techniques used throughout the design to recreate the car’s curvy shape. The end result is reasonably decent to look at, and although this does result in it being noticeably more fragile than an official LEGO set, it’s certainly robust enough to stand up to some play time.
Verdict
There are definitely some instructional kinks for Brickworms to work out then, but the models themselves appear well designed, well detailed, and – whilst expensive (our Jag is €65 plus shipping) – could make decent additions for Lego car fans, particularly the collectors of LEGO’s Speed Champions sets. Take a look at what they have on offer at the Brickworms store, where a range of vehicles, instructions, books (from which many of the kits originate) and animals are available to buy now.
★★★½
Photos courtesy of www.mensch-berlin.de