Hobby Craft kits

Hobby Craft kits can be fun, they tend to be fairly basic, especially on the interiors so you may want to look at some aftermarket stuff or scratch building some details. With a little work they can be very nice.

Indeed they are often fairly basic kits, but still pretty good all in all. Their strenght is in the originality of their offerings I think... That's better and easier than vacuform and scratchbuild, so let's not knock them off altogether.

Yup...I built their Piper Cub for my wife's grandfather....turned into a pretty nice kit with some extras....

They've picked up the name "Hobby Crap", that pretty much explains it all for me.

They've got some real lemons, some baisic kits, and some OK ones. I did like their BF-109 series.

The key to Hobby Craft kits is to know what time period they come from, anything from about 10 to 12 years ago up to now is pretty good.

Prior to that Hobby Craft was known for pirating other manufacturers stuff and usually their kits from that time could be classified as crap. They must have come under new management or something.

They're a mixed lot, most of the kits are decent. I guess you could say that Hobbycrap's kits are today's best bang for the buck.

Academy released a buncha kits over the last few years which are reboxed Hobbycraft. Some examples would be: Bf 109D, Bf 109G, I-16, La-5/7, P-26, P-35, P-36, P-40B/C...

These may not be available too much longer, though. IDEA, the toolmaker, sold the tooling for these kits to Academy. The tools, however, were owned by Hobbycraft and negotiations have been underway for a while now. It'll be interesting to see what comes of this, although all the reboxed kits have been taken off of Academy's website. We'll see what happens...

Here's a shot of my 190G-6/R6 as proof that you can build a fairly decent model from a Hobbycraft kit.


Fade to Black...

So should I have gotten the Su-27 you think?

Please allow an old timer to insert his two scents worth about Hobby Craft. I have seen a lot of decent kits fro HC but the there are some I wouldn't dump on my worst "friend".HC has released kits that no one else even considered like th B 36, B47, B 58, P-40 B ETC.... The biggest problem I have had with Hobby Craft is that they will not respond to requests for damaged or lost parts and they will promise a new kit release and we never see it. The Grumann F-9F Couger comes to mind . They promised that kit four years ago and it still hasn't shown up. Good luck.. Fred Amos

For Hobby Craft I had some fair luck with them, their early AAF Fighters where pretty good, their DO & JU series need help compaired to the Dragon/Revellogram kits but they where out way before the later has but I've seen Hobby Craft released the old Esci & Otaki kits when they first came out just like Academy/Minicraft did with the old Fujimi & Hasegawa kits, but Academy/Hobbycraft kits are of the planes no one is willing to produce like the P-59 Airacomet, F7U-3M Cutlass,

Not only did Hobbycraft release copies (bad copies, at that) of Otaki/Arii kits early on, but they also had at least one copy of an old Monogram kit, the Ju 87. As with the ex-Otaki rip offs, this one was really badly done.

IDEA released some of these under their own label and I remember the P-40 was so bad that I just tossed it. (ME! Mr P-40!) The original had recessed lines (and all those godawful rivets), but the copy had raised lines and rivets and it looked like they had shoveled some sand into the mold. It was just pathetic.

As to the delay of announced kits, Hobbycraft aren't the only offenders. Actually, I shouldn't refer to them as offenders; who knows what difficulties they're going through to get a kit out. (A good case is the AMtech P-61's.)

Anyhoo, Trumpeter announced the 32nd Thud back in... was it 2000 or 2001? The same has happened with all the major manufacturers at one point or another, although most are good about getting releases out 'on time'. As to the Hobbycraft Panther, (and the P-59 which was delayed some) these are the exceptions rather than the rule. Hell, I'm still waiting for DML's Invaders...


Fade to Black...

On the matter of Hobbycraft at one time puting out crap copies of other companies kits, I remember buying a 1/72 S-2F Tracker that turned out to be a very rough copy of a Hasegawa kit (I built the Hasegawa kit a couple of years later).

I also had a 1/72 FW-190A from them, I don't know what its origins were, but it was easily the worst kit I ever built, nothing fit and the decals looked like a high school silk screening project gone wrong.

On their products these days, their 1/48 Dehavilland Vampires are good with minimal extra work, I've heard the same of their 1/48 A-4 Skyhawk series.

Their 1/48 T-33 from a few years back is also a very respectable offering.