These are amazing: imagine a kit in which you need to cast the parts before assembling them!
The Skullduggery firm has perfected a system of non-toxic casting media in which kids can learn about a subject while building a display model more or less from scratch: they have fish, butterflies and of course the ever-popular dinosaurs.
When one associates injection plastic and rotation-molded vinyl with dinosaurs as the medium of choice, or solid-cast resin as the third option, to find open-molded plaster in use is at first an odd selection, but plaster can copy extremely fine detail and it’s non-toxic for junior use.
The idea is that kids pour pre-mixed casting medium into provided plastic molds, demold the plaster parts, paint them and assemble them, a somewhat greater involvement than conventional kits offer, prolonging the educational experience without the intricacies of a conventional build-up. The kits even include paint, brushes, glue and mounting magnets, so the finished object is all ready for display.
In a way, this is kit building which incorporates scratchbuilding, and the basic principles of casting are made available to young builders at an age when it’ll become second nature and very probably serve them well in more ambitious projects in the years to come.
There’s only one drawback from the standpoint of the adult builder: though the boxes are beautifully illustrated with photographs of perfectly reassembled museum-display skeletons, the kit actually builds a two-dimensional dinosaur, a ‘panel mount’ in museum terms, in which the bones are seen in profile against a rock matrix. There’s nothing wrong with this and it certainly simplifies things for the younger builder, but it’s not quite the stand-up-and-roar display the box seems to promise.
The products are sold in the livery of the old Collins Eyewitness Guide books, a wonderful range of teaching volumes which assembled information on a plethora of subjects, illustrated with photographs of actual objects and artefacts. I remember their dinosaurs volume being the first I ever read, so it’s rather fitting that I encounter the range through their T. rex.
Here are some useful links – check them out, if you have kids these will provide fun, insight, education and practice for building! You’ll probably find them in Museum shops far and wide, and here in Aus at the Australian Geographic shops
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