What's the worst kit you ever bought?

The Special Hobby stuff have a special place in my heart. This kits, though they have nice subjects, the plastic moulding is just enough to pay my sins. I am sure that I will be going directly to Heaven after that.

To be accurate, AMT/Ertl. I just say AMT to simplify things.
Lee

Yeah, the newer stuff isn't bad at all.
But is it AMT, or AMT/Ertl? The last kits I bought were the two '71 Duster 340 (what?? no '70???) kits, and they look great.

Unnamed player, have you looked at AMT's new tools? They are chock full of detail. I'mnot talking reissues, but new tools. Like the 57 chrysler, 60 Ford, and many others. Check 'em out! You'll change your mind!
Lee

Lindburg F-8E. Nothing fit. I think the people that designed it went their own way making the parts without checking to see if they would even fit or was the correct size. It was suppose to be 1/48 scale but most of parts, not all, were 1/50 scale. I tried to do something with it and finally drop kicked it out the door.

revell of germany 1/32 a6m5 zero - re issue of the 1987 kit, no detail. had to scratchbuild the entire cockpit, even the floor. and as for the cannons, WHAT CANNONS?!?!!? another bad kit was the monogram Acura nsx. the decals SUX! any amt car, expecially the '78 firebird (at least i think it is). nothing fits, nothing works, no detail.

Wow! The worst is the one I'm currently doing. Revelle-Monograms representation of the P-38. I've had to sand so much I'll have to go back and rescribe all of the lines and rivets, (they looked so good in the box). More flashing than I have ever seen, some pieces i've cut off were bigger than the actual part. Horrible model, I'll never buy another one from these folks

Funny how my memory of awful kits is mainly SF stuff. Accuracy, fit, all kinds of problems. I wonder why? Manufacturers didn't think SF modelers cared about accuracy? Too bad.
I built more military than SF growing up, but I can't recall any real stinkers from that genre.
Again, I was just a kid!

My vote for worst kit is the 'orginal' Tamiya Shinano in 1/800 scale (they just re-released it in Japan). It is just a put together toy. More current is the Glencoe re-issue of the Strombecker Space Station. After a pack of sandpaper the ring is almost smooth.

Yeah, paulnchamp, I can remember never being able to get the warp engines to stay on with the early AMT Enterprise kits. Of course, I was a kid and didn't know what I was doing. Like most companies, though, their later efforts weren't so bad. But I understand their "Slave I" is supposed to be horrendous.
I recall almost anything by Lindberg as being particularly substandard.

How about everything by AMT, or later AMT/ERTL! As a hard-core Trekker, I've build every one of their Star Trek kits, and each is a major disappointment.

Without a doubt, Maximum Warp Models 1/72 Skydiver. I bought it back in about 1990 and have made virtually no progress . I'm not sure that there is a single part that is the right shape or size.. Indeed, since it's a vacform, I'll probably have to make every piece from scratch anyway

djmodels,

Yeah those VEB kits could be a real trial.

You knocked a modeling memory of mine awake.

I got my hands on a VEB Let 410 Turbolet in 1/100. I was so enthusiastic about having it in any scale as the 410 has some of the nicest lines of any Eastern European originated aircraft.

I ran into a lot of the problems you mentioned: hard and brittle plastic that didn't go together without super glue, decals were roughly printed and barely adhered, oversized and hazy windows.

I love the Let 410 but not enough to have completed that particular representation of it.

dans1120, I built the Revell USS Missouri way back in my teenage years, before I cared about seams, so I have fond memories of my Mighty Mo. It eventually suffered the fate of many models, destructive testing via the firecracker.

More recently, a horrible kit I worked on was the Matchbox He-219 in 1/72. Poorly formed landing gear and the bottom of the starboard wing was significantly (1/8" in real inches) shorter than the top of the wing. A true disgrace to the He-219 plane. I've completed it, but I can't stand it so it may be headed for a catapult launch off my third floor deck.

Several kits come to my mind, but the top spot could very well be the Dassault Mercure airliner from VEB (also known as Plasicard), from the former East Germany. Scale:1/100.

Hard plastic but very brittle, horrible decals (problem since Air Inter's decals don't come too often!), oversized windows, raised panel lines, few details... Still, I haven't completely abandonned it, and I even have other VEB kits surfacing time to time on my workbench. Madness...

Just about anything Hobbycraft Canada made up to about a decade or so ago could be hell.

Their current stuff isn't bad since they cleaned up their act from the old days.

Two kits that come to mind were both from them. A 1/72 FW-190A, I don't know what its origins were, but it was terrible nose to tail. It was the only kit I was so unhappy with that I actually wrote a letter to the manufacturer and gave them hell for even thinking to put it out there. The fit was barely there, the panel lines were suspect and the decals looked like a high school shop class's silk screening experiment gone wrong.

The kit that really put me off of Hobbycraft for a long time was their 1/72 S2F Tracker. I later found out it was pirated from the Hasegawa kit. Oddly enough, the decals were the only good thing about this kit. There was poor fit all around, hazy clear parts. I don't know what sort of plastic they used, but it melted down like nothing I'd ever seen before and I wasn't using anything fancier than Testor liquid cement.

Other dishonorable mentions I can recall:

Aoshima's 1/72 Hawker Hurricane
Airfix's 1/72 Boulton Paul Defiant
Hasegawa's 1/72 EE Lightning F.6
Monogram's 1/72 Panavia Tornado
Revell's Visible Woman (great idea, poor engineering)

Even the best companies can release a dog of a kit that just leaves you shaking your head wondering what they were thinking when they engineered it.

Revell of Germany's Trabant kit. Plastic tires , poor mouldings, curbside kit, expensive for the quality and what you got, never did finish it, anded up trashing it. One of only two I ever wrecked before completion.
Lee

For me it's invariably the one I'm currently working on!

There are a few winners that I've come across, I just have to refresh the old memory banks...

Tentatively, I'll say an Imai copy of Otaki's 48th P-40. Talk about barking dogs, this was such a bad model that I simply tossed it. And I'm Mr P-40! LOL

It was really horrible. The Otaki kit had engraved lines, this one had what seemed to be a mixture of raised and recessed. It looked like the janitor had dumped his dust pan into the mold before they let plastic flow.

The clear parts... well let's just say that I use the word "clear" as a matter of form! Did you ever go out to your car after an ice storm (CA & FL residents ignore this reference!) and see the swirly cut-glass-look-typa patterns that the ice sometimes makes on your windshield? These clear parts were a real work of art, let me tell you.

Decals looked like they were made by hand with Crayola no-stain (RIGHT!) markers. The box art was even a bad copy of the original Otaki box art! I'm not kidding about any of this! LMAO

As I said, I tossed it. So I can't comment on fit problems, but it couldn't have fit too well. Either that or it fit like a glove! That would figure, too!

Fade to Black...

Two kits come to mind, first is the DML Brumbar. The only way I can describe this kit is awful. Too many warped parts, parts with excessive flash or sinkholes. I've been trying to build this kit for the past few years. It's still sitting on the shelf. The other kit is the Trumpeter T-69II. I had to use 3 different types of glue and when I weathered the tank, several parts fell off and had to be cleaned, glued and painted again. I swore off Trumpeter kits until they came out with their new kits in better plastic. I won't even get into the bad fit, inaccurate detail and crappy decals. I am so happy Tamiya put out a T-55.