of In the next picture, you can see some of the goods: a tape measure, glue, my box-o'-parts, some Legos (for making square corners and straight lines - lucky for me the kiddos have hordes of blocks!), my instructions, a big piece of plexiglass for the base, and some chocolate (this last bit is essential - must have fuel!).
The individual pieces have very good detail. They all have a convincing sandstone texture, and many have hieroglyphs - I have no clue what they might say, but they sure look cool! I noticed very few "bubbles" on the parts - sometimes plaster parts are riddled with these annoying flaws, but not so here.
I started with the pillars. One thing the instructions don't really tell you is that the pillars are in 4 pieces each - you must build the top half and bottom half, and them assemble the two halves into one pillar. The instructions simply say to glue the top half to the bottom half; it really is pretty self explanatory, but still…for the sake of completeness… (Important to note that this is the only problem I noticed with the instructions, and it is pretty minor). The next photo shows the pillar halves assembled - I set them aside at this point to allow the glue to dry before putting the halves together).
With the pillar halves drying, I moved on to the sphinxes and their plinths. Seven parts make up each statue (see picture), and the instructions show very clearly how they go together. Some quick gluing and I had all four done. At this point, I noticed that I was going to have some extra sphinx and other parts - yay for extras! I also decided at this point that the construction was going much more quickly and smoothly than I had expected! Yay for easy!!
