Editors note: Whilst ETKVR Sile Crafts are a good friend of this site, we will always publish our honest review. In our expert team’s opinion manufacturers should rely on expert builders for a pre-launch review before unleashing on the general public!
Built & reviewed by D.J. Gibson
TOYQI’s Magic Wardrobe is a kit I have been looking forward to since before its release. It is made primarily of printed MDF along with printed acrylic, stickers and one plastic lamp post. The instructions are in color and somewhat easy to follow. The instructions for the light kit could use some improvement, especially the fairy lights as you can barely see them in the illustrations being white on white.
The print quality is good with all pieces cut within their print boundaries. The pieces were easy to remove from their boards. Almost all of the pieces fit properly in their assigned positions.
The construction of this kit is a bit on the odd side. You begin building the left side of the kit with the stairwell, bookcases and ceiling arches between windows. The stickers used on the stair cases, ceiling arches and wall molding do advise you to glue them in place. I tried to just use adhesive at each end of the stickers but caved on the third night and glued them. The stairwell stickers managed to pop back up after being glued so be prepared to hold them while the glue dries. You also have a small acrylic panel in the bottom that slides between the two halves. This will attach to the right side as soon as you begin that construction.
The ceiling arches are not all secured and those not secured are prone to movement. This makes applying the stickers here much more difficult as pieces are moving while you attempt to line them up. These also require glue or adhesive strips as they will remove themselves without additional adhesive as noted in the manual. One suggestion that I would offer is DO NOT install the Centaur figures until the very end of this build. You will be moving both sides of this kit a lot during construction and they will end up having sword fights if installed. I am sorry to say that one of mine lost its fight while I was working on the back and the sword snapped. There are no spare parts of these pieces so my only option was to glue the sword back in place.
The lighting kit for this build includes both LED bulbs and fairy string lights. The fairy string lights are used to illuminate the side windows in the walls and are extremely troublesome to install. You are instructed to glue them in place and I chose to use adhesive strips instead. The string lights in many places won their battle against the adhesive strips and refused to stay in place. If these will not hold them in place, I can’t imagine trying to glue them with anything less than superglue to ensure they stay in place. I would have preferred that they used LED strips installed on the edges of the windows as the fairy lights create bright spots in the windows instead of spreading the light across the surface that a strip would offer. The instructions direct you to run the string lights across the bottom of the rear section. The issue here is that there is a gap under the rear acrylic sliding panel that leaves a gap providing a clear view of these lights and other wires. I ended up raising the lights and wires out of the view of that gap because the overhead light here was also casting wire shadows on the acrylic.
From there you start installing the side walls, front doors and the roof panels for each side. If you haven’t secured the wiring properly, they can get in the way, especially on the left side with the addition of the touch control panel. Installing the front doors to the side walls requires installing metal hinges to the walls and then the doors. The instructions are not very clear on the direction of the hinges and I installed them all backwards on the walls before finally understanding the instructions and fixing the direction of the hinges and attaching the doors.
The right side installed properly for me without issue. The left side I removed and reinstalled at least five times attempting to get all of the interior parts to rest flat against the wall and the roof panel to lay flat to no avail. The arches push upward on the roof panel raising it higher in the center than the right side even with ensuring all wires are in the proper notches. It feels as if the roof panel slots are cut about 1mm too low causing it to arch upwards and hindering the interior components from resting properly against the wall.
The rear wall is attached with six hinge pieces that you construct and then install with the sides open giving you a better angle to attempt to insert the tabs of the hinges into the side walls. The left side where the battery compartment is has a jumble of wiring that you will wrestle with to keep from getting in the way. The right side someplace how felt more difficult because now you can no longer reach inside the side wall to support it. I did get it installed but not without hinges popping off the rear wall in the process.
At this point I was hoping that the final roof panel may help align the left wall and in some ways it did. However, this panel only attaches to the rear wall and the rear interior panel. You use a Griffin in the roof panel that goes through the track in the interior roof panel to marry these parts. This leaves the interior components able to raise the exterior roof panel.
Now the build is complete and should function properly. I am able to open the right side of the kit with one hand but the left side requires two hands. The front doors will not stay closed flat against the front of the kit which I think may be the screws protruding from the hinges prohibiting this. Because of the use of the fairy lights, there is a gap between the bookcase and stairs illuminated showing the wire cluster in that area. And today I believe I saw how the sword on the rear centaur snapped. If you close the right side first, the wall under the stairs of the left side can catch the sword and either pop the centaur out of the floor or snap the sword. The battery pack is accessed from the left wall access panel but I don’t know how you will remove the battery pack as it was almost impossible before the rear wall was installed due to the access panel folding down and still blocking part of the battery pack you are attempting to remove.
I truly admired the ingenuity of this kit design but my build experience with it was not enjoyable. Perhaps I got a bad kit but the challenges I experienced heavily outweighed my expectations for it.
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