[Review] The 31006 Highway Speedster Set

[DarthYannick]

Hello, I'm a newbie in the LEGO system. It's because of the birth of my son few months ago that I'm into it. He is just a reason for me to buy some LEGO :-) Something I always wanted to do before ;-)

I know that there is already a review on that set, but I wanted to do something less technical, something for newbies from a newbie. Sorry if I don't use the righ names for bricks. I'm new... ;)

I hope you will like it :)

If it's against the rules to post another review of the same set, please let me know. I delete it.

One more thing. I'm not an english native speaker. So please correct me if there is some mistakes :-)

Ok, my first real set. A Creator one. Simple, not so expensive, and quite nice actually. I know that I’m going to get the X-Wing soon, so I wait to buy more Star Wars set in the future. But at the same time, the more I look into the Creator line-up, the more I see the possibilities of it.

As you can see, it’s a 3in1 model set. But you can’t make 3 models out of the box, you can just make one at a time. I knew that of course (as everybody knows, but what about kids?). And I presume it’s not a bad idea to buy these kind of set by two minimum. For example, with this set I could build the truck, the car, and hook them together. Or do some kind of race between the two cars.

Inside you get three polybags with bricks, and 3 manuals. One for each model. Each step is very well explained, you build few bricks per step, progress is steady and reasonable. Even for me it was fun. It took me about 30′ to build the main model. Most boring part is to “un-build” the model before making another one.

The main model is a superb sport car with a rear mounted engine and scissor doors. There are less than 20 sport cars with these kind of doors in real-life. I don’t know which one they got the inspiration from, but I feel that the Lamborghini Aventador was partly used for this model. With a lot of imagination and beers, you could see some similarities.

That is an aggressive front I quite like. Look at these air intakes. For sure the engine needs lot of oxygen. Original engine on this model was a V6, I want to modify it a little to make a V8. More powerful. More fun.

Rear view is not bad either with 4 exhausters. I just wished that the little red tiled spoiler was placed a bit higher.

What I find nice on that car are the transparent engine cover and the scissors doors. It’s fun to play with them.

Look at this engine. I’m also planing to modify it. I find it a little bit too flat, too small and too low. It doesn’t look powerful enough for me. I’ll think of something.

[update] I did some modifications on the engine. Still a V6. I wanted to make a V8 not as low as the original design, but then I couldn’t close the top. So I had to move the engine back (closer to the rear), with 2 cylinders lower than the other 4 (I’m not sure if that was accurate to real-life engines). The 2 yellow bricks are the injectors (didn’t have another colour – I wanted them black, or even red).

There is no steering wheel on this car, something I wasn’t expecting anyway. I did modify the wheel system though. Originally, the wheels are connected by one axle. So they all spin at the same speed when you want to turn a corner with the car. You know that in your real car, you have a differential to help you turn because the wheel on the outside needs to spin faster than the wheel on the inside of the turn.

So as you see on the picture, I cut the axle into two part thus I made some kind of “differential”. It’s easier to turn the car like that. Not perfect, but way easier.

Beside that, I wished the roof would open as well. I like that car. It was fun to build, and it’s nice to play with it.

The Lotus Seven Like

Can’t get out of my mind that this model looks like a Lotus Seven. I like this model as well, but not as much as the main one. It was also fun to build. I have in mind to build it in red. I just need to find all bricks for that...

The Truck

That’s the model worth buying another box for. I think that a child would play a lot with one of the sportcar and that truck. The crane is articulated. But don’t expect it to be that useful, the moving parts are a bit too loose and thus don’t keep their position. It’s often falling down one way or another. But may be it’s because I didn’t tighten them together that well.

As I prefer the main design, I didn’t really bother fixing that problem for now.

Edited December 17, 2013 by DarthYannick

[MatiPasio]

Nice job, thanks.

[DarthYannick]

Thanks, but it's noting compared to the other review here on that forum...

[DarthYannick]

The more I look at the roof, the less I like it. I need to remove it...