Good and not so good manufactures

Airfix is pretty straightforward.  Zvezda, from Russia, is excellent but very complex.  My experience with Eduard is that they are complex.  Tamiya goes together like a dream and is usually pretty well detailed.  

My focus is WW2 fighters in 1/48.

Welcome back to the hobby. I "returned" about five years ago and have enjoyed a great learning experience with the help of other FSM forum members, past and present. Your question does come up from time to time and the best answer is to ask you more specifically what you may like to build. Like a computer search, the more targeted your question the better the resulting answers.

Most manufacturers have both pearls and swine depending on age of tooling, scale, and other stuff including reboxing by other brands. Your best bet is to read lots of online reviews about the subjects that interest you and building a few of the most highly regarded kits to get a feel for what gives you the most rewarding time at the bench.

Happy days;

Mike  

Well it basically boils down to subject choice. If you want to build a 1/48 Me-109G, there are plenty of kits to choose from in various skill levels, detail levels, and price ranges. But lets say you want a 1/72 B-47 or a 1/48 F-102A, your choices are far more limited. Decide what you are interested in, what your price range is, then ask for kit recommendations. Most companies have their good and not so good kits.

If you're just back in the hobby and you're trying to get your teeth sharp I'd avoid the latest Kitty Hawk kits.  I hear they are a real paint if you're not experienced.  Some of the Kinetic kits are difficult, as well.

I have built some decent Trumpeter kits,but you really need to read individual build reviews on kits because no blanket statement really suffices,evey manufacturer makes dogs also.

Cloud Hopper

Welcome back to the hobby.

I'd say the simplest advice for kits to stay away from is this, the more it costs the harder it is to build.

Some of the more exotic manufacturers like Zoukei Mura make great kits but they are so complex most people buy them and then get scared of them so don't build many. Also stay away from the bigger scales like 1/32 and 1/24 as these are much more detailed due to the size.

If your looking to get confidence and technique go for Tamiya, newer Revell kits, Hasegawa as you've listed as they have generaly good kits with simple instructions. Instructions can be as important to helping you build as anything else, I'm sure all of us on here have looked at some instructions from Dragon and have had no idea where a part is supposed to go!

Good luck and keep asking questions we all do and we are all learning

Phil

Some good reviews here. www.kitreview.com/reviews.htm

I'm easing back in myself. I'd echo the comments to start with smaller scale and have some fun. I just bought som Eduard 1/72 kits and they are lovely. Get a magnifier hood and it will make life much, much easier.

Welcome to the hobby !

My 2 cents   :

I learned the hard way that cheap does not necessarily equal easy to build (some very old Hawk or Airfix kits that you can get for a few dollars).

One of my very first fun kit I enjoyed building was the Academy P-51 Mustang in 1/72 scale. If you like this aircraft go ahead and get it, very easy to do. A bit more expensive but worth it.

+1 on spendign the money. I just picked up an older revell 1/72 Fokker eindecker and i can tell it will be a pain to fill and fair. By comparison, the Eduards are lovely in terms of fit. How much is your time worth? On that note, the Eduard "Weekend editions" leave out the PE and fiddly bits that might slow you down and sell the kit at a discount. Nice compromise.

I'm a relatively recent returnee as well. What I've found so far is that, as people have mentioned, you can't really go by manufacturer. Every maker has some gems and some dogs. Besides that, companies frequently buy older molds and rebox them, so a box can say Italeri and contain a kit from pretty much anybody. And just to keep it interesting, some companies rebox their own older kits every few years with different decals so a kit that looks like a new release might actually be from 1987. Your best bet is to read reviews before you buy. If you have a certain subject in mind you can look at all of the different versions and pick the one that works best for you.

And now that I've rejected the idea of sticking to a single company, I'm going to recommend Airfix. They've released some great kits in the last few years, and they price them to move. For example, their 1/72 P-51D builds like a dream and costs seven bucks at my LHS. Just make sure you do a bit of research and actually get the new toolings, because the stuff from the 70's comes in the same kind of box and they DON'T build like a dream.  

Afternoon Guys, I just want to thank all of you for your great answers.  I have to admit, some of those manufacture's some of you have mentioned, I've never heard of them.  So much has changed over the years.  I'm going to stick mainly with 1/72 and 1/48 scale.  I've got 3 Revell 1/48 kits and the rest are all 1/72.  Everything is WWII except for the 1st kit I bought which is a Monogram 1/72 B-36.  When I was little and they had just started flying, my neighbor down the street was a Lt. Colonel at Biggs Field here in El Paso and he was a pilot on them.  This guy sounded just like Jimmy Stewart, if you put them in the same room and couldn't see who was who you wouldn't know which one was the real Jimmy Stewart.  He also got the honor of flying the 1st B-47 into El Paso.  On Armed Forces day, he would always take us and get us in and we would get to go up inside a lot of the planes that other's couldn't.  

Thank you again for all of your answers.

J Cloud Hopper Motts

I would also add, that, on average, I find modern jets to be more complicated and finicky than WWII aircraft (I only build fighters - so that's all I'm referring to).

having said that, the best thing to do is to try and find a quick review online.  Lots and lots of them, especially if you're sticking to the more well known brands.

Modeling Madness has a well-organized and extremely extensive list of reviews - especially planes. The forums are good, too.  

Cloud Hopper, that had to have been awesome getting to ride in B-36's and B-47's!

I'd recommend any of the Academy or newer Airfix kits, they go together quite easily and are very moderately priced. I jumped back into the hobby back in 2009- I was 23 and hadn't worked on a model in about ten years at that point. The first kit I bought in 09' was a Testors 1/72 SBD Dauntless, which is actually an old Hawk kit. But let me tell ya, it went together as easily as building a club sandwich is. That kit is somewhere in the neighborhood of about 7-9 dollars. I found it in an A.C. Moore craft store that my ex had "volunteered" me to go into with her (gotta give her some credit, if she hadn't dragged me in there I wouldn't have gotten back into the hobby!). Testors also made a Corsair kit in the same scale. Both kits aren't much on interior detail, but they sure are fun to put together. You might want to keep an eye out for them in stores!

I've never had good luck with a Testors kit. Any of them that I've bought (and it's only been a few) always had something severely warped on them, usually the wings and fuselage. Although they're low-cost kits, they're not worth the time, effort, and money I spent on them. I don't get a lot of modeling time due to my job, and, when I do, I don't want to spend most of it fixing things - I just wanna build a model......