Sluban M38-B0363 Not Lego Helicopter Set Review

Welcome back to Its-Not-Lego.blogspot.com! I keep a giant list of all my building sets I've bought over the last few years and upon checking it today, I bought this Sluban Personal Helicopter set M38-B0363 exactly 3 years ago.

The Set Review

This Sluban brand set has 259 pieces and consists of 3 minifigures, a small ground vehicle, a fueling station and a red and white helicopter.  This set is part of Sluban's Aviation series, of which I have some of their other airplane building sets.  The helicopter design is very similar to the blue Lego helicopter set 3222.

The multi page instruction booklet is glossy and the instructions are well documented. I had actually packed this set away, so I had to scrounge around to find the minifigures and rebuild the set as close to the original instructions as possible.  I'll point out the differences I made further in the review.

  As I mentioned earlier, you get three minifigures which are not Lego compatible.  The Sluban minifigs have completely different parts and about the only thing you could share between these and Lego minifigs are the hats and hairpieces, everything else is incompatible.  On the plus side, you can tilt the heads on Sluban minifigs.

You get the fueling station attendant, the ground vehicle driver and the helicopter pilot.  I couldn't find the orange guys hairpiece, so I gave him some Elvis hair (thank you, thank you very much).  I swapped out the pilots head to give him some sunglasses also.

I couldn't find the original pieces of the fueling station so I moc'd something similar to the original design.

When I was rebuilding the ground vehicle, I decided to stretch it out a bit, so you can carry both people and luggage if necessary.

The above picture is from Sluban's official website and it shows you how the original fueling station and ground vehicle looked like.

Here's the set pieces with the minifigs.

The Helicopter

And here's the helicopter with one of my other Sluban minifigs.  I figured he looks like a mechanic for the helicopter, so I included him in the picture, but you don't get this guy with the building set, sorry.

 I re-built this set fairly quickly and I've separated it here into three components, the large rotor, the roof and nose cone, and the remainder of the helicopter fuselage.

I have to say the clutch power of the Sluban bricks is excellent, and the brick quality of this older 2014 set is much better than the recent Construction series bricks.  The large rotor spins freely on the helicopter motor.  There's also a smaller rotor on the tail.

Here's the fuselage and interior.  There are three sets of double wheels on the undercarriage with the front  wheels being turnable.  The rear wheels are located under the large pontoons.  There are 4 porthole windows on each side of the helicopter and also two accessible storage compartments at the rear.

 Inside there's a cockpit with controls and pilot seat and behind that are two passenger seats.

 Here's how the cockpit looks with the pilot in place.

Here's the top view of the helicopter's interior.  There's definitely a lot of space for cargo in the rear.

 Following are some more pics of the assembled helicopter.  Fit and finish is excellent, in my opinion.

The Verdict

I think this helicopter looks really nice and scales well. As mentioned earlier, it has excellent fit and finish.  Clutch is great and there's quite a bit of play value with the ground vehicle and fueling station accessories.  If you don't like the Sluban minifigures, you could easily replace them with Lego compatible ones.

I paid $10 USD for this set back in 2014 and a quick check of Aliexpress reveals that you can get this set for $12 USD, so it hasn't gone up that much.  The retail price of this set on Sluban's website is around $25 USD right now.

Thanks for looking!  If you want to see some of my other Sluban set reviews, you can find them here.