Worst experience with a kit that went together, it merely sucked

Mine was a "holy grail" kit- the MPC 1972 Grand Prix. I own the real car, so I went crazy putting every last detail in it. On top of that, the wheels kept falling off, the chrome foil kept rising off the car, and generally feeling like it was going to fall apart any second. It made me so burned out, I took a three year sabbatical.

MPC Thunderbird ( a '57 I think?? ) built for my father as a Christmas present one year. Granted, I'm an aircraft guy, but that thing would have been drop-kicked into the neighbour's yard if it had been for me. Not enjoyable in the least.

R/M Tomcat. Someone was on drugs when they designed the build of this kit.

Didn't see that one coming!

The Navigator

Didn't see that one coming!

Monogram P-61 Black Widow...

Nichimo 1/48 Jake.....with MPM 1/48 HiTech He-177 a close second...and Special Hobby 1/48 Midway Buffalo taking the bronze medal.

I'm sure there are a ton from when I was a kid, but I was a bit less discerning then, so if it didn't fit, you know, glue it till it stuck together!

Since I've come back to the hobby...definitely have to give the AFV Club Achilles the nod. The upper hull, visible turret surfaces, and turret counterweight were all covered with ejector pin marks. I literally wore out a chisel blade getting all those bastages off. 

On top of that, a lot of smaller parts (turret ammo racks, and pretty much anything smaller than the main gun assembly, really) had ZERO positive location. An extremely faint little outline in the plastic that often as not just interfered with fit. Turret walls were the same. Just slabs that you stick together, glue, and pray your hands don't shake or anything. 

Then there were the instructions, which IMO made Dragon's instructions look like Wingnut Wings' instructions.

It came out pretty great in the end, but man that was a battle of a kit.

Runner up would probably be Eduard's Yak-3. Not a bad kit at all, but the alternating crisp and cartoonish detail and worst landing gear fit (none...very AFV Club in that regard) I've ever encountered soured an otherwise pretty decent little kit.

1/48 Modelcraft F-82. I think anyone else on here, that has built or attempted to build the kit would agree. Make sure the family is away, or in deep sleep, 'cause the words will come spewing out. Some words will not be recognizable, some will be familiar, and at some point, you will curse the day that you were born into the same world that had this kit in it. That said, I almost want another one!!!

fermis

1/48 Modelcraft F-82. I think anyone else on here, that has built or attempted to build the kit would agree. Make sure the family is away, or in deep sleep, 'cause the words will come spewing out. Some words will not be recognizable, some will be familiar, and at some point, you will curse the day that you were born into the same world that had this kit in it. That said, I almost want another one!!!

fermis

1/48 Modelcraft F-82. I think anyone else on here, that has built or attempted to build the kit would agree. Make sure the family is away, or in deep sleep, 'cause the words will come spewing out. Some words will not be recognizable, some will be familiar, and at some point, you will curse the day that you were born into the same world that had this kit in it. That said, I almost want another one!!!

Agreed. The problem is I have two

Manstein's revenge

 

Speaking of building a kit...your production sure has slowed down of late...just sayin'...

 Work sucks! Takes up all my time. I'm building today though!

Finished 19 from Jan-May. Work has had #20 on the bench WAAAAY too long.

hasegawa 1/48 190. fuselage halves and wings were warped bad. nothing wanted to fit on the kit. someone proble left this kit in the sun or something. i bought the same kit and gave it another try with no problems. 

fermis

1/48 Modelcraft F-82. I think anyone else on here, that has built or attempted to build the kit would agree. Make sure the family is away, or in deep sleep, 'cause the words will come spewing out. Some words will not be recognizable, some will be familiar, and at some point, you will curse the day that you were born into the same world that had this kit in it. That said, I almost want another one!!!

HisNHer Tanks

Ok this isn't about the kits that failed, that wouldn't go together, that ended in the round file.

This is about the kits that succeeded, and yet at the end, you swore, never again would you build something like that, even if you paid me.

Citadel models, the ones used for Warhammer table top wargaming.

I once assembled a tank looking thing for a chap that realized I was a lot better at making tanks than he would ever be. He offered me 40 bucks to put it together and I thought sure why not, these things look simple.

Wrong!!!.

Not sure what it is with that company, but they sell the most over priced worthless garbage a model maker can ever be cursed with encountering. And after reading some of the critiques of some of the kits I have looked at in recent time, well let's just say Citadel sure never wants to ask any of US to do a review.

It was horrible. The parts had 5 kits worth of flash, the part fit was dreadful even measured against the 70s. The molds had been worked harder than a Chinese WoW gold farmer. I was paid 40 bucks for a short afternoons work and I told the chap, thanks, but forget getting anything else made.

So what is in your past, that maybe I shouldn't be asking you to remember :)

Your problem was, you got a games workshop molding. If you want quality wh40k stuff you need to go forgeworld. 

That tank is 62GBP. Expensive, but if you love the subject matter, worth it.

As for failed kits.

Probably Tamiya's repop of the Bell X-1 in 72nd. For some reason that kit just did my head in. It wasnt hard to build, it had nice detail in places, clear sides were a nice touch, but i just hated it. It drove me up the wall trying to get the paint even, the gaps filled, the canopy painted. Thats an aircraft that needs to be 48 scale minimum to be enjoyable.

Other than that ive never had to biff a kit after ive started.

Has anyone ever built the Williams Bros. P-35? That kit always made tough men shudder when they saw it at the LHS.

Trumpeter 1/32 Corsair.

Never, ever again.

fermis

1/48 Modelcraft F-82. I think anyone else on here, that has built or attempted to build the kit would agree. Make sure the family is away, or in deep sleep, 'cause the words will come spewing out. Some words will not be recognizable, some will be familiar, and at some point, you will curse the day that you were born into the same world that had this kit in it. That said, I almost want another one!!!

Ditto... Although, I gotta admit, that after the parts were cut, thinned, filled, sanded and all that crap, it went together fairly straight-forwardly..  Vac-forming the new canopies was a REAL treat though.. Went through a lotta clear ABS that day... Same-same with vac-forming the spinners... 

It was my first attempt a short-run kit, so I guess it shouldn't be TOO sorely hated...  Yeah, I'd buy another too... 

Just to trigger your PTSD, Fermis...

There should be a separate reward or medal or something for building that bird... You gotta REALLY WANT an F-82 in your 1/48 fighter collection to finish this kit...

That Modelcraft F-82 makes the worst Revellogram kit seem like a "shake-n-bake". I know what ya mean...if I could get another one real cheap and knowing what I know now maybe I`d give `er another go....

REAL cheap is what I paid for it, lol.. Think it was like 12.00 or somethig close to it.. Monogram would never send a kit like that one out the door...

I think I paid about the same for mine. I`ve seen them on Ebay for $15-$30 ! I wish Monogram would make a 1:48 Twin Mustang...maybe the nightmares would stop....

Well, they just re-released the old F-82 in 1/72, so I wouldn't look for one from them in 1/48 until about... Never...

My nightmare kit was a 1/72 scale AWACS plane I built for the model airplane club back in High school. Me and another kid, Eric, worked on it for over a month! It had previously been started by another student and they did a piss poor job! For some reason they had thought that the two wings were supposed to be glued together, never mind that a fuselage had to go in the middle! They used a ton of glue too, to the two wings were very much bonded together. TO top that off, we didn't have saws, just some dinky hobby knives we had to hack away with. 

Once we got the wings apart, we found out that idiot student glued the fuselage together without installing the canopy first! (it fit from the inside) so while we were  figuring out how to wedge the canopy in there it broke in half. That actually helped us get it to fit, but now the clear plastic was fogged with the plastic glue (all we had were the testors tube glue, btw) with a big crack down the middle. We just left it figuring we were gonna paint over the glass panels with silver anyway.

Once we glued the wings to the fuselage (which was an iffy fit because of all the hacked off plastic on the attachment edge) we found out one of them had a lovely warp to it. We lacked the knowledge and ability to fix it, so we just left it. We then worked on gluing the engines to the wings. Those actually went on pretty nice if I recall.  Then Sgt  came in (he was hosting the club in the AFJROTC room) and said, " those engines are on the French and export planes. If you want an American AWACS, it uses the other engines"

So another week was spent hacking off the incorrect engines and replacing them with the American ones. One of the engines took a sliver of the wing plastic with it as we removed it too.  Then we went onto the aerials and the big radar dish on top....which the directions for placing were very vague. We had to look up pictures of the actual plane to figure out where the big dish went. Even then the two legs of its stand didn't really sit right on the fuselage.

The painting went off without too much of a hitch. I mixed some left over grays together with this metallic blue and got a really neat color out of it. Sgt really liked it too. The AWACS radar dish did give us trouble in that the white paint kept cracking on us.

We finally finished with the paint and decals and hung it up from the ceiling....then I noticed we forgot to repaint the glass!

I recall one piece of French armor that I did,  a small , 1/35th Renault UE (f)  tankette that had been modified by the Germans to launch rockets.. It was a "Mixed-Media" kit, with ABS, styrene, P/E brass, and resin parts, and indy-link resin tracks...

While it built up rather nicely, once I got it painted and weathered, but the actual construction was a nightmare with the instruction-sheet being in French, and the exploded-view drawings were pretty poor... At any rate, I wanted to show the driver's hatch open, which meant some interior detail had to be built, so I did seat and transmission (tranny's a Panzer IV piece w/ brass wire shift lever).

 And it was SMALL!

Here's the track with a 1/35th Marder and Flakpanzer for size-comparison prior to painting and adding the rocket-launchers.. All the parts required lots of sanding to get them to fit...

I'm working through 3 Revell F-14s. They are bad. But I have seen worse.

The only kit I ever trashed was the 1/48 Testors F-4G. The fit was bad, but salvageable. However, before I started working on the many seams I stepped back, looked at it and thought about it. The cockpit was awful, the detail seemed soft, the kit weapons were weak, the decals were nothing to brag about. I decided I was better off scrapping it and buying the Hasegawa. Which I did. The Testors kit just wasn't worth the time or the putty.