Is Heller HMS Victory still produced? Is there another company that has bought the molds?

I haven't actually had my hands on one of those kits in many years.  When it was new (in 1978 or thereabouts) a magazine sent me a review sample; I never got around to finishing it, and eventually gave it away.  Since then I've read quite a bit about it on the web (in this Forum and elsewhere).  Lots of modelers report that the Heller Victory kits they've bought have suffered from warped parts, excessively brittle parts, and other symptoms of cheap plastic.  I don't have any firm evidence of just when these problems started showing up, or where.  (I don't know whether, for instance, the kits in American boxes contain shoddier plastic than those in British or French boxes - or vice versa.)  The general consensus seems to be, though, that the older kits are somewhat better.  The twenty-year-old one you find on e-bay may actually be more "buildable" than the one you find in the hobby shop.  Or maybe not.  Personally, I'd be reluctant to lay out the cash for a model like that (which almost by definition will be a multi-year project) without seeing what's inside the box first.

Whether in production or not they are readily available in the US. Many hobby shops have them gathering dust on their shelves as do countless homes across the USA. This is one of those kits that people see in a store, go ooooooh and aaaaahhhh, buy it, open the box, look at how hard it is going to be to build, faint, and when they recover close the box forever. They are always showing up on eBay with intial listing prices that range from $25-175 and sales in the same range. WS

It may no longer be in production (the Heller website hasn't been updated since 2006, and Cherbourg Maquettes, the nearest serious model shop to the Heller factory, don't list it in stock) but it is still pretty widely available. One of my LHSs has at least three, maybe four - two of which are the Airfix boxing, one of which is the Heller. In the UK at least, both boxings cost the same, so the Airfix one, which includes two dozen useful full-size tinlets of Humbrol enamels, is the one to go for.

The Heller spare parts service is up and running. If you contact them, and ask nicely (ideally in French), they'll send you a copy of the Heller instructions, which are also written in English and German, and are much better than the English instructions provided with the Airfix boxing. You still need proper rigging diagrams, though.

Cheers,

Chris.

 I happen to have one.  I would love to build it but have no place to display it and I'm getting a little old to do a good job.

If some one is interested It's up for sale.

I heartily concur with Jtilley's final sentiment - Airfix can truly claim to be one of the founders of the plastic kit industry and it would be a sad day indeed if it were to disappear, whatever became of the tools.  I personally was delighted to hear Hornby had taken up the reins because their long involvment with 'adult' (and I use the term carefully!) hobbyists in the model railway sphere should see them in good stead to look after what is, after all, no longer really a childrens pursuit.

I ran a survey of our club members recently (mainly to give me material to print in the club newsletter, but the results were instructive) and one of the questions was "What was your first model?".  About 70% of the replies received named an Airfix kit (and 60% of those the 1:72 Spitfire by the way).

While sentiment and nostalgia hardly make a good business case, especially with the soulless bean counters who ultimately decide the future of the industry and what kits we may, or may not, look forward to in the future, an awfully large number of us older generation of modellers 'cut our teeth' on Airfix

Michael 

Amen.  Maybe we can hope that some of the other Airfix ships will come back.  H.M.S. Prince?  The St. Louis?  The Great Western?  Scott's Discovery?  The Endeavour?  Drake's Revenge?  The Sovereign of the Seas?  Some of them are pretty old now, and don't represent the current state of the art in styrene kit technology.  But the plastic sailing ship market is so small that I'd be delighted to see any of them on the shelves again.  Every one of them has the potential to be the basis for a beautiful, accurate scale model.  (My un-favorite of the Airfix sailing ships has always been the Bounty, which in my opinion is a little inferior to the much older Revell version.  I'm a little disappointed that this one is on the website.  But the company management of course has to consider the market, and name recognition is a mighty important marketing factor.)

The same goes for the Airfix 1/600 warships.  Quite a few of them appear on that website (almost all of them marked "out of stock" - temporarily, we may hope).  One that's conspicuous by its absence is H.M.S. Iron Duke.  I've always regarded that kit as an extremely important one; it is, to my knowledge, the only World War I capital ship offered by a mainstream plastic kit manufacturer.  (OK, maybe ICM, with its excellent 1/350 German battlecruisers, qualifies - and yeah, I know H.M.S. Hood, the U.S.S. Arizona, and the Airfix WWII-configured H.M.S. Warspite technically meet the "WWI capital ship" definition.  But you see what I'm talking about.)  The Airfix Iron Duke isn't a bad kit, either.  If those mysterious donuts are chopped off the barrels of the secondary battery, it can hold its own in comparison to most modern 1/700 kits.

Long live Airfix!

jtilley wrote:

I suggest we cut Airfix some slack, and be glad that those kits are coming back.  The Wasa, in particular, is one of my favorites.

I agree.  Just the fact that they have listed the kits on the website shows good intent on their part.   

Mark

jtilley wrote:

That website lists four sailing ("Classic") ships:  Cutty Sark, Victory, Bounty, and Wasa.

 And amazingly, for the very first time I see a boxart of the Wasa in it's correct (red) color instead of blue.

That website lists four sailing ("Aifix Classic") ships:  the Cutty Sark, Victory, Bounty, and Wasa.  All of them certainly appear to be the good ol' Airfix kits, which were about 18 inches long.  And all of them are marked "out of stock."

That website is brand new; as of a couple of days ago, keying in "airfix.com" only got you an invitation to register, so you'd be notified when the new site was up and running.  I think it appeared in its present form yesterday.  That's great news.  The company quite clearly is struggling to get back on its feet after a pretty horrendous financial crisis, and the website may well be experiencing some teething troubles.  I suggest we cut Airfix some slack, and be glad that those kits are coming back.  The Wasa, in particular, is one of my favorites.

I do hope the 1/100 Victory gets reincarnated too.  I've mentioned elsewhere in this Forum some of the rather conspicuous mistakes from which it suffers.  (It's probably too much to hope that the new Airfix proprietors will include a new sprue containing some means of fastening the yards to the masts.  But maybe - maybe - they'll see fit to prepare a new English-language instruction book, written by somebody who understood French and made at least an attempt to build the model.)  As such things go, the problems in that kit are pretty minor - and eminently correctable by a competent ship modeler.  In my personal opinion it is, with the arguable exception of the Calder/Jotika 1/72 wood version (which costs about $1,000), the best rendition of the Victory in kit form - plastic, wood, or otherwise.  For it to disappear from the market would be a real shame.

billydelawder wrote:

I just looked on the Airfix site, and they have it.

No they don't.  If you check the detailed listing in the online catalog it's "Out of Stock".

Mark   

 

billydelawder wrote:

I just looked on the Airfix site, and they have it.

Be careful. If it is the one on the Classic Ships page then that one is the 1/180th version and not the one that Heller released. If it is this one... http://www.airfix.com/airfix-products/ships/warships/british-navy/a99252-hms-victory-kit-2/?searchguid=200791519613&resultspage=&sortorder= then it is mis-labelled. Although the scale states 1/100; the price, and number of parts, is way too low to be the Heller one as well.

 

I just looked on the Airfix site, and they have it.

  It is still availible from HobbyCraft. Hobby Centre in Ottawa had them on the shelf...

not cheap though

 

 

Andy

The Heller Victory was most recently released by Airfix before their recent demise and resurrection, both companies being at the time under the Humbrol banner.

Whether the new Hornby-owned Airfix will continure with it we'll have to wait and see, as well as what may become of the Heller brand itself.

Michael