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What's the worst kit you ever built? (60s-today)


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We all have a beef about kits! but from beginning to end what was the worst  kit you built? Lets hear the horror stories! The older guys need to shake their memories and remember that piece of crap from long ago.Please try not to scare the young ones out there! 

Edited by baronred3
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Oh, that's easy...a 1/72 T-34C Mentor from "Sky High" models.

 

I don't typically build 1/72, but the club I was in at the time (Pensacola FL), we were doing all the training aircraft from NAS Pensacola through the years for an IPMS Nats club entry. I picked the T-34C and the Vought Kingfisher. For the Kingfisher, I used the "Octopus" kit (don't know why, it was just there at the time I suppose), that was bad enough but built into a nice model. There was no other T-34C at the time other than a vac kit I believe but I found the "Sky High" kit on eBay or something. I remeber one fuselage side being shorter than the other...long and short of it...it ended up in the trash can. Only kit I ever tossed mid build. Not sure who eventually built the T-34C for the display or what kit they used, but it got completed.

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I wont pick on kits from the 50s and 60s, but of the more modern toolings one of the biggest disappointments was the 1:72 Sword Banshee. I was really expecting something nice, as I heard a lot of good things about Sword.  When I opened the box, the parts looked nice enough, but upon assembly I realized that those pretty resin parts did not fit, and worst still was that the chord length of one of the wings did not match the chord length of the wing stub on the fuselage.  Not an easy fix.

 

What made it even more annoying is that the problem only occurs on one side. The wing stub on the other fuselage half has the correct measurement, and matches the wing perfectly. Just bad QC during the tooling design. 

 

Another was ICM's  original1:72 Dornier 217 line. Waaaaaaaaayyyy over-engineered. Some of those landing gear components were thin as stretched sprue, but had chunky sprue attachment points, and assembled largely by end-to-end joints. Just one big fragile mess. 

Edited by RKic
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1:48 Premiere BAe Hawk T.MK 1A. Came out in the early 90s, but very crude. Barcalounger ejection seat and decals for a cockpit, seven part fuselage decades before Kittyhawk, virtually no surface detail, and what was there was obliterated under generous application of bondo and hours of sanding.

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"Worst" as in fit/quality or accuracy? I have built lots of kits with terrible fit over the years - too many to remember a "worst". I think the most frustrating are the ones that you expect to be good but that require a lot more work than anticipated because of excessive flash, big steps in where the moulds are supposed to line up, or inexplicable terrible fit between parts that look great in the box, etc. An example was my particular copy of an Eduard Mirage IIIC that had such a big step where the mould seams were, that I had to scratchbuild many of the small details using the kit parts for reference. The kits that you know upfront will be bad are usually not so frustrating in practice - examples are re-pops of old favourites where you take out a tube of putty even before you open the box. In fact, I find that some kits that you know in advance will require a lot of work can be extremely satisfying when completed - an example would be the 1/48th ICM Spitfire range - lots of work, expectation of short shots and flash and all sorts of other bad things, but with care the final result can still be fantastic and they are pretty accurate and very nicely detailed - to finish one of those feel like an accomplishment, but not particularly frustrating because you know what to expect.

 

But when it comes to just a terrible combination of poor accuracy, poor details and poor fit, I would like to nominate the 1/72nd scale Airfix Il-2 sturmovik that I built many years ago. Even I sometimes accept a kit because from a distance it looks like the real thing. The Airfix 1/72nd scale Il-2 does not look like an Il-2 - not even from a long distance while squinting. The original boxing had bad decals. Fit was terrible. Surface detail was cartoonish. Other details were nonexistent. Clear parts were extremely thick and barely resembled the real thing. In fact, it had no redeeming features I can think of. OK, you could build it so the wheels would turn... I would have cut it some slack since the moulds date back to 1964, but sure as heck they decided to re-release it (with new decals only) in 2012. Frankly, I pity the poor kid that got that as a birthday present. Not cool, Airfix!

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2 hours ago, Crash Test Dummy said:

1:48 Premiere BAe Hawk T.MK 1A. Came out in the early 90s, but very crude. Barcalounger ejection seat and decals for a cockpit, seven part fuselage decades before Kittyhawk, virtually no surface detail, and what was there was obliterated under generous application of bondo and hours of sanding.

Yes! I tossed that one too. To make matters worse, I was trying to build a T-45A from it.

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I have one of the Sky High T-34C kits here. We bought in P-Cola, I think at Bobe's. I was glad at the time to have a C,,,,but just a little disappointed at the actual kit when I opened the bag. Since that kit seems to "borrow" so much from the Hasegawa kit,,,,I set one of those aside and plan to use the Sky High parts as conversion bits.

 

My nightmare kit still is the old 1/72 Frog or Revell HE-219 (not sure who made it, molded in light blue plastic). Canopy defeated me in all attempts to get a good fit,,,,,and there was not enough lead in all of Wisconsin to get it to sit on the wheels. Which was okay, I guess, since the landing gear legs were someone's attempt to mold electrical wire in styrene. I gave it to my brothers to play with,,,,,,,it lasted about 1.5 battles and landings before all the bits broke off. Kind of a shame, because I did get all the antennas on right on that nose. Close second was Aurora's C-141 box scale kit.

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Off the top of my head  about 10 years ago I bought the AMT, 1/48 scale F-18A and F-16A kits. They  were inaccurate and lacking real details for 1/48scale. Not an enjoyable build.

Edited by Gordon Shumway
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expectation-wise eduard's danger zone. hobbyboss part of the build was so bad in terms of fit that i couldn't let myself use any eduard goodie in the kit, they'd be wasted.

 

build wise PST's 1/72 KV-122, build evolved into a philosophical level; plastic from flash or flash from plastic? tho i built an Eastern Express T-38 amph. tank kit recently in 1/35, it's capable of contesting with PST just as easily.

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Mine would be the 60s Airfix 1/72 scale R.E.8. The cockpit edging is very thick,but the struts had large balls in each end to glue in to just as large pits in the wings each strut was by it's self with no way to Aline them! the wings were probably too thick making the plane look heavy. Lots of work to get it to home base!!

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4 hours ago, 82Whitey51 said:

Yes! I tossed that one too. To make matters worse, I was trying to build a T-45A from it.

 

Ha same here. Dreamed of making a Goshawk but that Premier kit was so bad it became a No-Goshawk.  

 

However the PM Model kit of a 1/72 F-16 was far far worse. Tube glue was too good for that steaming pile of shtyrene...

 

 

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For me it the recently reissued Revell car carrier. There are like 50parts in there and ive never ever had so many seams ejector and flash in my life. Its on the back burner i pull it out whenever i have to watch the kid upstairs and sand away!!!!!!

 

 

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On 5/17/2017 at 0:29 PM, 82Whitey51 said:

Yes! I tossed that one too. To make matters worse, I was trying to build a T-45A from it.

I did the same thing to mine...made it into a T-45A, that is. I still remember I pissed off a pilot at an airshow. I needed pictures of the speed brakes, so I pulled them away from the fuselage to get a picture. I was young and stupid and didn't think to ask the pilot, as I didn't see him around. When I got the pictures developed, there he was in the background with a look of "What the *&%*#&^%" is that kid doing to my airplane? I feel guilty about it to this day!

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Hands down the Testor's 1/72 scale B-2. I finally made it through, but only because it was part of a display at Whiteman AFB. If it hadn't been for that, it would flown into a wall. I've never had a kit defeat me in 40 years of modeling, but that's as close as one came to making me give up.

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On 5/20/2017 at 8:22 AM, Ryan Hothersall said:

1:72 hobbycraft MiG-25. Bad fit and some parts were thicker than other parts. 

 

Finished it though. 

 

I came to this topic to say this.

 

Hobbycraft's 1/72 MiG-25 is the Hasegawa kit, but severely malformed. One side of the fuselage is larger than the other, so it will always be asymmetrical. The fine raised panel lines (already a royal pain in the behind on the Hasegawa kit) are rendered poorly and don't match up. The canopy is just solid, clear plastic- no ridges or anything. All the parts have a ton of flash on them, and the pilot figure has even less detail than the original Hasegawa version. The only time the kit was slightly worthwhile was the "War on Terror" boxing, which had a nice decal sheet for MiG-25PDs and a MiG-25BM. Too bad none of them were appropriate for the half-melted MiG-25P you'd get in the box.

 

The Nakotne 1/72 MiG-29A that was reboxed by Zvezda and Berkut for a decade and a half was pretty bad. It's a cartoony take on the MiG-29, with exaggerated detail, fantasy panel lines, tiny wings, a canopy that looks like a MiG-21's, a gigantic antenna, and an alien-looking pilot figure. Also, zero cockpit detail- it's just a seat.

Weirdly enough I have this soft spot for the kit - you can easily build and paint it in a single day, so I can see why Zvezda still sells it as one of their "Gift Packs" series- the lack of detail and quick buildability makes it a good kit for kids and people just getting into the hobby.

 

Strangely enough, Zvezda reboxed Italeri's MiG-29A with the same decals and exact same box art as the Nakotne reboxing. The only way to tell the difference (besides opening up the box) is that the Italeri reboxing has only Cyrillic on the cover, no English.

Edited by beingthehero
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Hobby craft Dash 8. Horrible fit all around.

Hobby craft Otter same as above but the first time I did this kit all the clear parts melted when in contact with the smallest dab of glue.  Never had that happen before or since. I have built another 2 Otters since then. They turned out much better and did not melt.

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