Hydraulic Claw

This crate was well put together. My daughter really enjoyed the experiment showing gas compression versus liquid compression. The only difficulty she had was in preventing air bubbles in her hydraulics. I helped her solve that by filling them while totally immersed.

My boys loved seeing how hydraulics work! They had a blast trying out new ways of arranging the pieces and seeing how everything moved!

We loved the hydraulic claw but after making it the next day it started tilting because of the weight of the syringes. and eventually we had to take it down. Good part : we loved making it, kiddo learned a lot while making it and used the knowledge and broken parts for his school project. Which certainly made him look super cool at school ;-) . Over all a good product but could have been little sturdier.

I love the open ended nature of this crate....that you create a basic hydraulic setup and can do so much with it. We've received three tinker crates, and this is by far our favorite...it left so much room for creativity, which greAtly enhanced my child's understanding of the concept.

He had a blast with this project. We did have to reinforce the arm so it didn't fall over (two syringes on one side and one on the other made it wobbly), but he figured out how to do that (even a guy wire!) all on his own. Everyone was really impressed with the quality of the project, and it was very striking when finished.

The ease at which our kids could understand how hydraulics worked because of interaction with the kit. They loved working with the plungers. We added food coloring to each plunger so they could see which line worked which part.