Sprue-ce Goose
Tracy:
Did Dragon listen to you and correct the faults you uncovered?
On the kit? Oh heck yes, like you wouldn't believe. They essentially scrapped their CAD twice and started over from scratch. The first iteration was a scale-up of the 700th kit and it was UGLY. We located plans, hull lines, etc., and had them scrap the hull and redraw it. Looked much better but then the superstructure looked weird... it turned out it was maybe 10-15% over-scale. They scrapped that and redid it. Then we started getting into the details.
One big lesson I learned quickly was that they are not "ship guys." They are great model kit designers, but I couldn't say things like "move the chock three feet forward" and expect them to do it.
They would send close ups of the island, the catwalks, etc., and I would look them over, find the errors, then locate photos of that specific area or detail and copy that into the CAD screen shot and circle the errors and write correction notes. There was some thought from another individual who was helping that there was no point in detailing the hangar deck, but I managed to figure out the pattern of air ducts, and it wasn't as complex as it looked from the plans, and whereas I'd just hoped to have an inch or two from the elevators detailed out, once we had this pattern Dragon went ahead and added ALL of the ducts, even the ones people aren't going to be able to see.
So yeah, as far as the kit goes, Dragon was willing to "lose" money by doing re-work, and we probably drove them nuts with the change requests. But they stuck with it and the product that is on the shelf today is an order of magnitude better than the first iteration.
With the instructions, essentially, there was bad coordination and schedule management. They had committed to a release date and were trying to maintain that schedule. The instructions can't be done until the very end, in case there is a piece that needs to be changed in the CAD at the last moment. We were actually changing pieces up until the last moment; particularly in the shape of the rear of the anti-torpedo blister. They have a limited number of molding machines available, and if you delay a production run by a week, what does that do to the rest of the scheduled runs?
So there was that, and then when the instructions were sent to us on a Friday, they told us they were planning on printing them on the following Monday! They did give us an extra day when we found a ton of typos (all of the island part number call-outs were wrong) and that also gave me a chance to write a request to change the order so that they were starting from the bottom and working their way up and out, leaving the most fragile pieces for last. They sort-of implemented it, changing the order of construction, but leaving the initial full sub-assemblies.
There just wasn't time at that point to rework them any further. It would have delayed shipment and deliveries, and I'm sure there would have been financial costs from the shippers, etc. I chalked it up as a lesson and asked that we have more dialogue about instructions on the next ship kit. They were positive to the idea, but I haven't even seen the first revision of CAD for Princeton yet, so the instructions are a ways off at this point.