UGEARSDate Navigator Wooden Mechanical Model

This day gear accurately shows the day in a week after you move the year gear to align with a particular month. We tested several dates against online calendars. They are all accurate.It has 7 moving gears in total, one being the year gear and six being small gears inside. The wood (or pressed wood board?) is pretty dense to enable precise and smooth cutting and inscribing. It can be a beautiful desk toy. I bought it for my 7.5 years old son. He needed some adult assistance.I took a picture with a typical clothes pin included for you to see its size.

I was ready to like this a lot, but a couple of stars fall off in the end analysis.This is a laser-cut plywood kit that requires no glue but patience and a pair of long-nose pliers. Laser cutting leaves very little clearance between the part and the slab of plywood from which it has been cut, so some of the smaller parts are difficult to break out of the matrix. I used a back-and-forth action with my finger and thumb on each side of the part to gently sever any small remaining links and break out the part without damaging it.The very small parts I used long nose pliers to do the same as the parts were much smaller than the pads of my fingers.I also used pliers to gently insert the various tabs called for, as they are a snug fit and too small to grip reliably with my fingers alone. I took care not to crush or snap parts as I worked.The whole kit took less than half an hour to assemble according to the pictorial instructions supplied, though I found it helpful to have worked on my car's timing when it came to recognizing the alignment lines on the planetary gear components for what they were. Understand all the instructions and make sure you follow them exactly if you want a working device when you are done.When finished, what you have is a perpetual calendar for 2017-2040. Easy enough to figure out. You align the year with the month and read off the days in the window according to the date matrix printed on the front.Stars come off because for all the snazzy moving parts, the planetary gears don't do anything but add visual interest. There is no moveable component that is driven by them. The whole device could have been composed of two discs with a center pin in point of fact.Actually, now I come to think on it, the planetary gears do allow the center pin to be square-section rather than round, which means it can be cut from plywood rather than supplied as an additional part.So the device, while very clever in conception, lacks five star oomph when I have it in my hands. Another star comes off because it can only "see" into the future. It would have been far more useful if it could for example have shown me the day of the Normandy landings or the Battle of Hastings.A good crafting project though, for an older kid with patience or adult.

I didn't know whether or not I would enjoy putting together this kind of model (or any kind for that matter), but these laser cut glue-less models look very intriguing. It was very simple to put together. It is not particularly practical, but it looks cool even if it is a little smaller than I imagined. I have 3 minor criticisms. 1) A couple of the gears and smaller parts did not come out cleanly from the sprue. The damage was minor and did not affect the function. 2) One of the pieces, the banner with the useful date range (at the bottom), did not fit where indicated. I could put it in the place as indicated, but it mad the rest of the model not go together correct. Not a big deal, but I had to take it apart and remove the banner. 3) There are no instructions to explain how it works. It is not very difficult to figure out, but it would have been nice to have an explanation.

This is an excellent calendar model or kit or device. It is very quick and easy to assemble (took me 10 minutes or so) and an interesting piece to have on your desk. The calendar is only perpetual in the idea that it covers the years 2017 - 2044, but there is nothing automated/electronic here, it has to be manually rotated. But the cool thing is, you can see the entire month's calendar, for any month within that period (so it only needs to be manually rotated once a month!). The date and day of the week are what it "calculates", so you can see those plus the month all at once. If you look at my photo, you can see that I have the device set to June 2020 at the top, and in the window below, you can see the entire month's weekdays and corresponding dates. So the Mondays in June 2020 are the 1st, 8th, 15th, 22nd, & 29th. It also covers leap years by using the months in parenthesis at the top (also, if it is a leap year like this year, the last 2 digits of the year are also in parenthesis, so you know at a glance it's a leap year). I found the wood to be decent quality and all of the parts snapped out and together without a problem. The construction instructions are only pictures (no written assembly instructions), but quite clear. How to use it is in written instructions which are also quite clear. I also found that the parts rotate just fine after assembly. Just don't snap the parts together as absolutely tight as you can get them, and you should not have a problem. Totally worth the price IMO.

I knew I was buying something that would need assembly, that’s half the fun! But, what I didn’t know was that I was going to have to cut the wood myself! This is simply stamped onto a sheet of thin wood (balsam or other thin plywood-like material)! I don’t have the tools to cut it apart! What a waste...I would not recommend anyone buy this unless you already have the tools to create one yourself...and then you honestly don’t need to buy this then either. VERY disappointed.At a minimum, I expected scored pieces that could be separated easily and sanded if need be. Not the case.

Great kit - built with my son for his 7th birthday. One minor complaint is that it would be nice if they gave you a sliver of sanding paper to knock the edges down on the pins a bit as they can be very tight / hard to get in place.

This is a wooden version of one of those perpetual calendars that are commonly sold as seaside souvenirs. You rotate the setting dial to show the current year and month and the readout shows the whole month with the day names correctly aligned against each date.Building it is fairly easy, especially if you are used to doing these sort of wooden or card constructions. It takes about half an hour. You don't officially need any tools, but I found a pair of pliers useful to gently squeeze some of the pegs and layers of wood home. Take it easy though - you can easily crush the wood by heavy use of such implements! The thing is softish plywood and not hardwood.It comes with a couple of replacements for the pegs should you accidentally destroy them. If you make a mistake, you *can* prise the thing apart (it is like a 4-layer sandwich) but it will only stand this a couple of time before the pegs that hold it together start to shatter/crumble, so prise it apart (with a flat-bladed screwdriver, if you need to) very gingerly!The only negative side of this is the fitting at the bottom which has the legend "2017-2044" on it. This doubles as a sort of "clicker" which is supposed to allow the setting wheel to only turn in clickable increments (rather than continuously). This didn't work very well - it broke by itself at first, and the second one (the kit includes an extra one) simply made the wheel hard to turn. I sandpapered off the prongs on this fitting and the wheel then turned much more smoothly.I wouldn't try to varnish this as I think any extra thickness of any sort to the wooden layers will stop the thing turning smoothly.A good gift to a mathematically-minded son/grandson, as I would also think they would be intrigued by how it works mathematically as well as mechanically. It led me to look up Zeller's Congruence.

I brought this for my daughter (14 yrs old) who has made a few wooden moving sculptures already and I thought this would be a good one to try out the Ugears range.The kit comes on 2 sheets of thin ply-type wooden sheets. everything snaps out (although I assisted as my daughter was a little fearful of breaking some pieces...and so was I!) and is very beautifully designed. It took a little fiddling to get everything to fit toghether as it was rather snug. It took her about 40 minutes to complete. Although she loved doing it and was quite intrigued how the little gears made the whole thing work together (and it is lovely to see it working as you use it), for the price I'm not sure I would go on to buy one of their other kits.This is a kit to build quickly, without much thinking. The whole thing is designed so well and is so lovely, it hardly feels like you needed any input to build it. If you want to build a kit and have a lovely finished product then these kits are for you. If you want to feel like a bit of yourself is going into making your model, then perhaps this isn't the kit for you.

So made this in relatively good time. I found the smaller pieces difficult to get out. I had a previous set from ugears so I used the equipment from that to sand parts and to wax parts. These seem to be key parts that are required. Unsure why they aren’t a standard item in each kit?Pros: Quick satisfying build, at £9 value pretty good too. Looks nice. Small sized won’t take up much space.Cons: small parts hard to get out. Some parts on fit in only certain holes. Lacks some wax/sandpaper.

Lots of fun. I did wonder if the pieces would "punch out" without breaking, but they were beautifully cut, and the whole project was a joy to put together. I shall be having a go at something bigger soon.

Simple and easy to built. Was a very quick build though and some of the pieces were too tight and needed hammering in slightly but this could also be solved with some sand paper instead? Good fun and very cleaver!