Lock It Up (SMARTLAB: You Build It) by Paul Beck

• 11/12/2013
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Lock It Up (SMARTLAB: You Build It)
Paul Beck
SMARTLAB (2005)
ISBN 9781932855241
Reviewed by Ben Weldon (age 11) for Reader Views (1/09)

“Lock It Up” by Paul Beck is a science kit which includes a book and materials to build a safe.  The kit was really fun, and it took me about ten minutes to assemble the safe.  The safe is fairly sturdy and is pretty hard to break into if you don’t know the code.

The book has cool information about locks and safes and other neat things.  The book tells you about things like the history of locks and how people pick locks and the tools that they use.  It also talks about biometric scanners and how locks are made.  It’s a very neat book.

The kit includes parts and instructions for building your own double security safe.  The safe has a combination lock and a swipe card.  The book has good instructions for building the safe, but I had a bit of trouble getting some of the parts together.  When complete, the safe is fairly sturdy.  The safe is about 6” wide by 4” deep by 6” tall.  It would good for hiding money or small treasures in, but unfortunately you couldn’t fit anything bigger like a diary.  That said, I’ve opened mine about a hundred times, and it is pretty fun.

I would recommend this kit to people who like their things protected (not extremely protected, though).  I think this kit, “Lock It Up” by Paul Beck, would make a good birthday or Christmas present for kids between the ages of about seven and fourteen.  This was a neat kit to build and the book was fun to read.  I think that everyone who gets this kit will have fun with it.