At the Fivium Christmas party this year I got given a Strandbeest kit in the Secret Santa. I thought this was excellent and had enough fun building it and playing with it that I figured it was good enough to make a quick post about before closing out the year. Below is a picture of the box I unwrapped (along with a kazoo, but that’s another story entirely) and it instantly made me want to go home and put it together. As a watcher of Tested videos I’d already seen Adam Savage put one of these kits together and it definitely looked like fun.

…

This past Christmas (2015) I was given a Konstruktor camera. The Konstruktor is a Do-It-Yourself kit of a fully-functional 35mm SLR camera which comes in a fairly flat box with all parts, except the mirror assembly, requiring assembly.

The Konstruktor kit was created and sold by Lomography, an organisation dedicated to experimental and creative photography, with a fairly heavy focus on analog photography.

Building the camera was quite fun and only took an hour or so, with some minor confusion around the gearing system for winding film but no real problems. The kit was assembled with Phillips screws rather than glue and it came with a small screwdriver which was good. I used some flash-cutters and a stanley knife to remove the parts from the sprues and trim any excess.

…