Unless you’ve been living under a rock you’ve probably seen Mantic’s Terraincrate sets of themed terrain, but until now I’d not tried one. Verdict: pretty good!
Everything you get in the box is plastic, and it comes loose in plastic bags inside the box. No sprues here. It’s a good hard plastic and goes together easily using a plastic cement. Most pieces come in two halves, including the pipe sections, so you’ll need to glue the top and bottom of each little section of pipe together.
Speaking of “little sections”, the set contains a few corners, joining collars, etc but only a fairly small number of short straight pieces. If you just stuck to what’s in the box you’d only be able to make a fairly short section of the large pipe. Luckily however the pipe diameter is pretty much spot on identical to 22mm PVC pipe that you can get from your DIY store. For a couple of quid you can get metres of the stuff and hugely expand what this set can do. I don’t imagine this is a coincidence and expect they had exactly this in mind when they made the set. The PVC pipe is thicker walled though so won’t connect perfectly using the pipe connectors in the set. But that’s nothing a liberal application of glue can’t fix.
A couple of nice features are that you get a couple of damaged sections of pipe, and one large outflow that I’ve turned into a nasty chemical pool.
As well as the large pipes you get a selection of smaller raised pipes and a set of walkways. The walkways can be assembled however you like, and the ramp sections can be made to go either up or down, so could make a good addition to large projects. They are designed to attach to the top of the larger diameter pipes, but doing so would limit the layout of those pipes a lot, so I mounted mine on some short pillars made from the plastic tubes from some Windsor and Newton brushes.
