Please Be Make Plaster Car Fun!

Cheryl found a fun gift for Isaac for Christmas (among the many fun gifts that she is so good at finding) - a "Make a Racer" kit. It allows you to make a working race car out of plaster of paris and some plastic accessories that come in the kit. It even included paint. What it didn't include where directions written by an English speaker!

The directions read like the output of some of these automated translators (likely because it was!). Phrases like "step 2 ... Cuts open the bag of plasters and put them into the mixing bowl." and later the warning that began, "Be reminded ..." made the instructions somewhat difficult to follow!

After having a bit of a laugh at some of the directions, I grabbed Isaac and we got started making the car. The mixture instructions were vastly miscalculated, though and I wound up with far too little water in the plaster. I had put it in a zip-loc baggie thinking I cut just cut the corner off and let Isaac squeeze it in ala pastry tool ... uh no. He looked at me after a second and said it was too hard, so I tried. By brute strength and determinaton I managed to extrude something that bore little resemblance to anything I'd discuss in proper company and certainly not a race car. I then again tried to enlist Isaac in mashing the ... uh, extrusion into the race car mold.

Half an hour, Oila! later we had a very hard plaster model of a ... uh, extrusion. Isaac was non-plussed - he was ready to add wheels. I pointed out that the plaster had been too hard to put in the axles and promised that we would try again with better plaster. The failed model quietly disappeared later that night.

The happy ending is that after a trip to Hobby Lobby (a favorite store in our family) and a second attempt with more legible instructions, we did manage to produce a car worth of the roads! Isaac has yet to paint it but he did help spray it green until he can find time to 'detail' it!