I got a call from my wife a week ago asking me if she could bring me home a K'Nex Raptor's Revenge roller coaster. How could I say no?!
I figured it would be worth a try to build it and see if it would fit in with the look of the Legos.. Besides, rumors have it that in a year or two Lego will release a coaster, but that's going to be a while. So while we wait, we can use this one. It cost about $35 at Walmart. I found it to be well worth the money. But I had to get over the hump of building it first.
I found K'Nex not to be as easy to build as Legos. Some pieces fit tighter than others and sometimes pieces would fall apart as I built the structure. But the worst part was the instructions. Imagine trying to illustrate a 3-D coaster make of sticks onto a 2-D set of instructions. Not an easy task and I found it very difficult to try and decipher which bar was getting what pieces. Especially as the project got more involved. I had to download the pdf instructions and blow up the pictures as large as I could to try and figure out what connectors they used and how. Some were more obvious than others and others you just had to guess.
After a while I started getting the idea and it started coming together.
It didn't take long before it began to reach into the sky. When completed this coaster is 3 feet high.
This is when things started getting really crazy. And it wasn't long after this picture was taken that I was taking the entire thing apart. Two days work gone. But I figured, from what I had learned, I could rebuild it much better. So I tore it down and started again the next day.
Next day I went back to it, rebuilding everything from the ground up. Sad thing was, I still ran into the same issues as I started to lay track.
The model sat this way for a few days while I fiddled with it and tried to work out the kinks. Stay tuned to find out what happened next!
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