Prismic Make Your Own Dog 3D Light – Cool Gifts for 12 Year

 

I do want to note that the box is marked ages 8+, and the manual suggests a build time of 1.5-2 hours. The info currently on the product page – 12+ and something around 6 hours – is far more realistic in my opinion. I put this together with my 13yo daughter and there were a few steps she wasn’t comfortable trying to do. It took us two sessions, the latter lasting 5 hours with some breaks.

That said – I picked this up because I’d been doing wooden 3d puzzle/models lately and thought this looked like an interesting variation. The build process is very different but in spirit its a similar kind of project. In this case, the pieces are pre-cut plastic panels that must be folded into shape and then connected with little pins.

I do have a few criticisms, but overall the build was fun and the finished light is cool, so I still consider it a solid 5 star product. Here are the things I’d like to see improved, though, in case any of these would be a show-stopper for someone else considering the purchase:

The instructions aren’t the most clear. To be fair, they offer video instructions (via QR codes you can scan), which we did not use; those may be better, but I generally expect to be able to work from the printed instructions. They alternate diagrams and photos to show how things fit together, but photos of abstractly-shaped translucent panels may not be the best choice. The diagrams use red and blue lines to indicate fold direction; this was a problem for my vision – my daughter did most of the folding because I couldn’t reliably distinguish the lines. There are a couple pages of general instructions and they’re worth reading before you start if you’re not already familiar with this line of models; but even those are a little vague in places. (The angle of each fold varies and you mostly just have to figure it out as you’re connecting things. They mention that sometimes not all connections are marked – but they say it’s easy to figure out the omitted ones – but also they mention that if anything doesn’t look like it lines up exactly, it’s probably not meant to connect and is used in a later step. That leaves a lot up to judgement.) In practice this might have slowed us down a little, and I’d like to see it improved – especially the low-vision issue – but we were still able to figure everything out, so it’s not terrible.

Sometimes you’re folding a small tab at the edge of a panel, and it’s very easy to bend the tab instead of making the desired fold. They do have some advice about folding technique that helps somewhat, but it’s not easy to be consistent and once you mess one up, it’s not easy to set it right. That said, the build really was very forgiving of mistakes, as the connecting pins tend to pull things into the correct positions. There was one time I was worried about the possibility of breaking a panel, but we never had that happen. Mostly what this all means is, your finished work may not look “factory precise”; but it still looks great and functions, and I guess the silver lining is that we know we have the unique product of our own work. Still, if I were to do it again, I might keep pliers on hand to help with those tiny folds.

I wish they had some kind of way to better distribute the lights within the lamp body. In particular, I’d like if there were some way to “catch” part of a light strand down in the dog’s legs, and up in its ears. What I found is, even with some effort to distribute the lights, handling of the lamp during the finishing steps tended to cause them to fall out of these spaces. Again, it still looks really cool – but in this way it could be even better.

Not so much a criticism as just for awareness – it takes power via a USB type A cable (the kind that plugs into the bigger ports you usually see on the front of a PC). If you have a spare charger, or – as in our case – a fixture with USB charging ports near where you want to put it, then it’s fine. But if you’re expecting to plug it into a wall outlet… you’ll need an adapter that’s not in the box.

So, that’s a lot of words for a handful of criticisms that, in the end, I didn’t feel warranted decreasing the rating. The finished light has a home on one of our end tables for now, and might move to my daughter’s room for a nightlight some time in the future.