Haynes Build Your Own Internal Combustion Engine

Bought item as gift for my 7 year old grandson...he had it put together quickly. Now he's taken his father's Ferrari 308 GTS engine apart and pieces scattered all over the garage...what have I done! All kidding aside, the gift was very well received!

The media could not be loaded. Delightful working model. Great for science fair project. Includes lights showing when spark plugs are firing. It has a single button to run it for about 30 seconds. It took my 14 year old about two hours to assemble.

Edit: I decided to come back and add some information to my review with regard to issues with the instructions. Hopefully this will help others who purchase this kit. Our kit instructions and parts list indicate that the timing belt idler pulley is a chrome part number 30. Our kit did not contain a part number 30 but it did have a part number 41 (not on the parts list at all) that looked a lot like an idler pulley. Looking at photos of the kit it seems clear that the manufacturer is substituting this new non-chromed part 41 for the old part number 30. An addendum in the instructions would be nice but, if you get this kit and find part 30 missing -- just use part 41 in its place and all will be good. The other mistake we found was that the part numbers for the crankshaft and camshaft pulleys are reversed but the only-fits-one-way construction on that step made sure we didn't mess up.I built the Renwal V8 with my dad (the motorized version with the "working" plugs) when I was a kid and loved the experience. Since Revell no longer makes the motorized V8 I thought that I would try this kit with my son (he's 13). We had a great time working on this together. I loved that the whole kit goes together with pressure-fit parts and screws. No glue necessary. I would have gone five stars except the engine has a tendency to seize every once in a while -- but I think I remember the old V8 doing that too.One tip: lubricate everything liberally. The tolerances on most parts are good but, as with a real engine, there are lots of "moving parts" and that means opportunities for things to catch or friction to get the better of the small electric motor that turns the crank shaft.With a couple exceptions, the instructions were clear. When we found ourselves puzzling over a step it was almost always a matter of us getting in a hurry and not taking the time to thoroughly read the written instructions as well as looking at the pictures.

I picked this item up to build with my son once he went over (and was fascinated by) the basic four stroke internal combustion engine in his elementary school science course.The kit went together smoothly with nothing but the screwdriver included in the kit, a pair of hobby tin snips, ant a hobby file. It took about four hours to put together (much was which was spent discussing the details with the boy; if you're building by yourself, it should go faster). Once completed, it operated quite smoothly.Pros:- Decent price (most model engines seem to cost quite a bit more).- Ease of assembly (part fit)- Type of assembly (all press fit or screws)- Cycle animation is first rate (I particularly like that it uses an encoder as a distributor and "fires" its "spark plugs" at each power stroke)Cons:- There are a few locations where the sprue flashing on the plastic parts must be carefully removed of it will interfere with the motion of the model. (It's nothing you won't do anyway if you've built a few models like this before.)- There's a bit of slop in the camshaft assembly. It's not really enough to be a significant problem with timing, but it's there.- The idler pulley for the timing belt is not on the part sprue shown in the assembly manual (at least for the generation of kit I received). It is still in the kit, just on a different sprue. I suspect they changed two of the injection tools they use to make the parts, moved which parts tree it's on, and missed updating the instruction book. It's not a big issue, just be aware.Overall, it's a fantastic kit. I really love that it uses grain of wheat light bulbs as "spark plugs" to show when the spark plugs would fire in the cycle. Normally, I'd knock it down to four stars for the instruction booklet error, but it simply runs so well it rates all five.

I think I remember seeing some good and bad comments on this, but just wanted to say that we got this for our 9 year old son for Christmas, and we had a blast putting it together. He has shown some interest in cars and so we thought he'd like it - he did. He has now taken pictures and videos of it, and wants to take it to school to show his class. A few things: I saw different versions of this, Haynes, Smithsonian. Didn't know the difference, but we went with the Haynes and it worked well. The instructions and book do a great job of explaining how a motor works. I saw a few comments that they put this together and it didn't work, so two words of advice. First, use a real screw driver, not the tiny one that comes with the set. Also, the pistons have to move freely in the block, but we're talking about plastic molded parts here. One of our pistons didn't want to move too well, so I put a TINY bit of superglue to hold it together, and it worked better. Also, there is a brief mention of using some vegetable oil in the block to lubricate the pistons, we didn't do that because we didn't read it until after the block was assembled. Ours is working fine, but don't miss that part at the very beginning. We had to use a bit of superglue to hold down the two piece top part of the block as well, because one piece of plastic was bowed enough that it would not stay quite in place to allow the the spring loaded firing pins move freely at the one end - a touch of superglue removed the bowing of the plastic and allowed that pin to work with the rocker, and it was fine. This took us about 3 hours, but wasn't difficult, and we really had fun putting it together.