Your thoughts please

Many thanks for the comments thus far. I 'won' an Italeri Graf Spee on ebay last night! Will let you know my views when I take a look at it.

Not seen any of other Italeri kits mentioned here in the UK.

The Fujimi kits aren't bad; they'd probably be considered really good if the Italeri kits weren't available for comparison. But the Italeri ones are much, much better detailed and more accurate. Take a look, for instance, at the small boats, or the details on the fantail bulkheads.

I'm not familiar with a Revell pocket battleship kit. Some Revell Germany kits are reboxes of Matchbox and Italeri ones. I can't recall seeing any warships in that category, but if Revell is selling the old Matchbox Graf Spee - don't bother.

One nifty thing about the Italeri kits is that the company made a genuine effort to depict the differences between the ships. Some of the differences are pretty obvious; the superstructures of the Graf Spee and Lutzow are so distinctive that they don't look like sister ships. But even the changes in the searchlight platforms of the Graf Spee and Scheer show up in the kits.

As a matter of fact, if I'm not mistaken Italeri did four kits: Graf Spee, Scheer, Deutschland, and Lutzow. The latter two, of course, are two names for the same ship; the kits represent her at two points in her career.

I'm sure there are some inaccuracies in these kits, but they represent a level of concern for accuracy that's rare in the industry. In my opinion they're among the very best mass-produced plastic warship kits.

The Italeri H.M.S. Hood is also a beauty. In some respects it's better detailed than the Tamiya one.

I Have the Italeri 1/720 Graf Spee and the Lutzow they are very nice in details, its a good choice. But i don´t know about the others, so i can't say its better or worse than the others.

In my mind there's no contest. The Italeri kit on 1/720 scale (also sold for a while under the Testor's label) is one of the nicest small-scale warship kits I've ever encountered. The detail on such parts as the small boats and the bridge structure is great. And the molding of the hull, with its perfectly-fitting underwater part, is downright ingenious. The kit has all sorts of subtle details that only show up on close inspection. Check out the finesse of the deck planking, and the detail on the bulkheads at the after end of the shelter deck.

The only part of the kit that isn't so nice is the strange piece of equipment called the "sail,." which Italeri represented as a sort of non-descript blob. It was in fact a boom-like gadget that swung out over the port side and lowered a piece of canvas for the recovery of the seaplane. The system didn't work well, and the captain ordered it removed and thrown overboard shortly after the war started. So if you're representing the ship as she appeared during the war you can leave the piece off and fill the locating hole for it.

The only problem then will be that the kit comes with a Heinkel biplane, rather than the Arado monoplane she carried on her one wartime cruise. If I were doing a wartime Graf Spee model I'd swipe an Arado from either the Tamiya Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, or Prinz Eugen, or the Dragon Bismarck or Tirpitz.

I built my Graf Spee in 1938 configuration - with the Spanish Civil War "neutrality stripes" on the main turrets, the Spee family coat of arms on each side of the bow, and the big gold eagle on the stern. Once I found a decent photo of the "sail" arrangement, making a reasonable reproduction of it from plastic sheet took about half an hour.

Gold Medal Models makes a beautiful set of photo-etched detail parts covering all the German warship kits available. It's on 1/700 scale, but fits the Italeri kit fine.

Hope this helps a little.