The Source Wholesale Hydraulic Robot Arm

My 8 year old daughter finally got around to opening the box and getting to the finished product in less than a day, with myself as the assistant. The play time using this thing is definitely worth effort required to get there, because there were times my daughter was losing interest and just found some assemblies needed my help. I gave here the reigns and stood to the side and did all the cutting of components from the plastic frames, which is a boring job but if you get a sharp craft knife it's not so bad. My daughter become a lot better reading the assembly instructions and identifying the components as we progressed through the different stages. It's not super complicated, but muscles are required to put the screws in tightly, and put the hydraulic tubes on. The hydraulics are super fun to setup and have working. The kit is really well designed and easy to follow. The plastic is good quality and components snap in together nicely. The different colour of the type of parts made it easy to follow what code the parts were. (pulling this thing apart and rebuilding would be tricky) The hydraulics make this piece really great to play with and understand how hydraulics work. Seeing the working in the tubes is really practical lesson about science. Way better than electric motor. On top of learning how these things work, playing around with the arm, picking up things, different shapes, using the controls is really fun to play with, it's definitely worth the money and the time to build this thing. My daughter can't stop trying to pick different toys up with this 'Claw' .Great product.

Overall the model accomplishes what one would expect out of a STEM toy and the end product is a lot of fun to play with. It's good value for money for the size/duration of the activity and the quality of the instructions (very good manual). It took us a good weekend's effort to get it all done. There are a lot of parts and taking your time is essential as there aren't any spares. The kids and myself enjoyed putting it together, and playing with it was a lot of fun. Setting up the hydraulic pistons and tubes is a lot of fun in itself. Size: It is not very large and can easily fit in a standard book shelf Age range: It depends, but a 10year old will still need some help to complete this project - i worked with an 8 and a 12 year old on this. It needs muscle to get screws in as they are self tapping into the plastic. My 12 year old could outpace me on most other steps of assembly.

Product Summary: Bought for my 9 year old as a gift. The product idea is amazing, the arm work great for picking up various items, and has a suction option too. The little handles are brilliant as they teach you coordination. Like driving a tractor. Lot of fun with it, not only for kids but also adults. But bear in mind It takes at least half a day to build the robot, as every single piece has to be assembled after being removed from a plastic frame and edges cut. A lot of mini manual work and need to follow instructions precisely. It was 3 of us building and still took us hours. Si make sure you are on your day off. Pros: Value for Money, Quality, Educational, Entertaining, Great fun building, Teaches about hydraulics, Good instructions, Hours of fun playing. Cons: Parts have to be shaped and small pieces cut out, Very precision work, Very time consuming and if not done properly the water leeks out of pumps, Once built the arm need a storage, as it is a bit bulky and cant be folded away. Conclusion: Highly recommend this product. Thank you and enjoy the product!

This is an excellent kit. The pieces are all nicely engineered and go together perfectly, though some of the screws are particularly tight going in and they're just a little too small-headed for a screwdriver with decent torque. There is general advice to remove the plastic burrs from the injection moulded plastic once popped out, but perfection in this is not usually essential, and there are more specific warnings on one or two more critical stages particularly involving gears. It does take some humanpower to build though! Although the packaging says 10+ it provided a fair challenge to an 11 year old and both parents with engineering backgrounds. Amazon's guidance of 18 months to 8 years should be ignored, unless that's how long they think a solo 10 year old will take to make it! Apart from those rather tight screws, nothing required brute force, but a number of the (many) steps were pretty fiddly and an impatient child without good fine motor skills will struggle. Once made, which took our team of three (as above) about 5 hours total, well .... it works, and works well. None of the pipes have popped off yet, and no water has leaked. I'm sure this will not remain the case forever, whereupon we will find out how easy it is to do whatever partial dismantling is required to remedy. The gripper mode is particularly good and the most visually appealing. The suction mode is OK and does work, but doesn't have much strength and requires the cup to be dampened in order to do very much. I don't know what the lasting appeal of the completed kit will be, but it's proving more than a five minute wonder, and was undeniably a lot of challenging fun for us to build as a family.

I'd bought my dad a book for Christmas, and it turned out that he already had it (possibly even from me!), so I felt a bit bad about that and wanted to get him a replacement present. Stumbled across this, read some of the other reviews, and decided that it sounded sufficiently challenging - my dad's a (retired) civil engineer, and, while this is more a mechanical engineering type thing, I thought he might enjoy it. He's taken about three weeks to construct it, working in between other things, and he's had a lot of fun doing it! He said he was really impressed with the quality and precision of the parts, and even more so with the clear and comprehensive (71 pages!) of instructions. But the extra bonus is that once it was finished, he's handed it over to his grandson (my nephew) who's six - he's been round there after school on three consecutive days, and while there he's done nothing but play with this! Moving toy cars around, lifting things, propping things ... the controls are quite complex, but not so much that a six year old can't learn to do it, and my nephew has got to grips with them really well. He (nephew) is not particularly gentle with it, but it's held up well so far - it will, eventually, probably fail somewhere, the hydraulics are favourite; but it may then be possible to repair, and even if it isn't, the many hours of fun that they've both had with it will have been well worth the money! My dad says that one of the best things about it is that it's about the best visual demonstration of how hydraulics work that you could get - you can see all the parts working, and exactly what they're doing, and my nephew finds it fascinating. Maybe another engineer in the making!