Sydney Opera House - in brass

You'd think a kit designed for "normal" people would be easy to assemble. Instead, I've built locomotives that were easier to put together than this!

Part of the problem is that to make things "easy", the kit used tabs and slots to locate the parts. You push one through the other and then bend it over to lock the two bits together. There are many places where I'd love to have run a bead of solder but the metals coating would prevent this. Since the end result needed to be unpainted, stripping this off wasn't really an option. Besides, I was supposed to be building this for fun, not a serious project.

 

Even if you are a normal person, you'll need some small pliers with tiny noses to put this thing together. You'll also need a Stanley knife or similar to cut the bits free from the fret - something the instructions don't mention.

 

The design of the building doesn't help much. It's all curves and angles. If a wall isn't curved, it zig-zags in and out and this doesn't always come over in the instructions. All bend lines are etched as dotted lines rather than the kit convention of half etching, a pity as this would have provided an indication which way the bend was supposed to go. In my experience you get to change this three times before the metal snaps...

 

Anyway, after around 3 hours fiddly work, I have the start of an Australia corner in my display cabinet. At 13 x 8 cm, it's a nice size (no, I don't know what scale it is) and I have the satisfaction of having made it myself.