Adrian Lonsdale

A word to the wise, this slide is fantastic, but requires a lot of work to put together. We bought and built this for my kids' birthdays. I built it with their grandfather and it took us over 12 hours. There are literally hundreds of screws and bolts, most of which need pilot holes drilling. The parts are very helpfully labelled with their part numbers using pricing stickers. This saved an huge amount of time.

There is some sawing required too, depending on the configuration you have.

Most of the parts were fine, though half a dozen of the tongue-and-groove roof slats didn't escape transit unscathed. Some lost their tongues or a side of their groove and one was nearly snapped in two, however a little wood glue and a vice sorted them all out. Where a tongue was lost we drilled an extra screw or two into the slats to secure them.

Some of the legs were slightly warped, and needed a bit of force to line up the bolt holes, but once in place the structure holds itself very satisfyingly.

The one real issue we had was with the screws through the bottom roof slates. The instructions showed the screws passing straight through to some chocks at the tops of the legs, but we found the screws were angled and went into the bars between the slats. We modified this by re-drilling the holes more vertically.

The work, though tough, was totally worth it. Both my kids (2 and 6) love it have had great fun on it.

It does need to be on flat ground, but we got round this by using the spare wooden parts to create spacer feet for some of the legs, then screwed 65mm screws at an angle through the leg and foot.

The frame comes with a liner to turn the base into a sandpit, but with the number of cats near us, we quickly decided not to use this. If it came with an easy to remove panel, then this would solve the problem and be a great feature.

The take away message is, this is a great toy once built, but expect to have to work hard and think outside the box!

5th July 2018