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…. Continue reading →