Well, sort of. It's actually a model of an internal combustion engine. But it's pretty detailed, and it was much bigger than I was expecting, which is awesome. It just comes as a bunch of plastic parts and a very detailed manual, and then you chop all the parts out, squish them together, and a million screws later, you have a really cool transparent engine that goes a long way towards explaining exactly how they work.

All of this is really great, because I'm an engineer, and the thing I love most in life is taking things apart, figuring out how they work, and putting them back together. This let me do two of those three things without having to get my hands all gross and greasy, and more importantly, while allowing me to still have a working car at the end of it. I'm not a mechanic by any means, but I have done a good bit of work on an old '86 Cabrio, and I'm fascinated by engines because they're machines and they're complicated, and this manual - after walking through putting it together - goes through and explains exactly what it's doing. There are even spark "plugs" that glow when sparks would be happening, and little valves that open and close, pistons that go up and down...well here.

I didn't post this gift for forever, because I wanted to get a chance to play with it and put it together and take pictures of it. And I'm sorry for my lateness, giftee, but hopefully this will make up for my lateness at least a little bit. I took some pictures as I went along, and then decided to let my phone do the picture-taking for me...every five seconds or so...and then stitch them together into an awesome timelapse of me building this sucker.

Throw in some cliche timelapse background music, tack on a montage of shots of the thing actually working set to an overly dramatic cliche backtrack, and (several hours of fun and fiddling later), and we've got over two and a half mezemerizing minutes of YouTube.

Or at least pretty comprehensive documentation of this Reddit gift.

So thanks, giftee! This was awesome, I've got it sitting up on my bookshelf. My favorite part is the little lights that are timed for the spark plugs, combined with the valves...it really just brings everything together to illustrate quite plainly how these things work, which is pretty cool, because I love knowing how things work. I'm an engineer. It's kind of my thing.

Click through the photos on the right first - the video picks up where they leave off.

Edit: The post editor is being stubborn and won't let me move the video up to the first item, and insists on putting this picture of me up first...but seriously, check out the video. :P