most frustrating kit you have ever built

Revell P-61 Black Widow.

Italeri (Kinetic) 1/48 F-16C.  Totally sucked.

Heh heh, usually it’s me that causes the problems! 

But so far the worst fitting kit with the most seriously difficult engineering I have encountered is Modelsvit’s VVA-14.  Warped banana peel 3-piece pontoons, Ikea furniture-like landing gear wells with zero detail, and multi-part outrigger struts that can go wrong with each joint that gets glued together.

A friend who is a much better modeler than I actually built the kit, and warned me about the outriggers.

BUT, that is the normal ride the older Modelsvit/Amodel kits give.  Their latest stuff looks awfully similar in the box, but are WAY better in molding, fit, and detail.

I don’t know if you count multimedia limited run kits for consideration since they are often the toughest kits because of their nature. My toughest has been the Fantastic Plastic 2001: A Space Odyssey Space Station 5, however I haven’t been tempted to throw it or stomp it. There are resin pieces with some distortion that needed to be corrected and about a kamillion teensy and delicate photo-etched parts made from hard stainless steel, but no-one else has tried to issue such a complex subject in conventional injection molding.

I actually enjoy the challenge of solving the problems and working through them until I have climbed that mountain and have a unique and impressive looking model to be proud of. This is one where I could have used a fourth and fifth hand and microscopic vision. I couldn’t believe it myself when I actually got the 80 minuscule spoke gussets clipped out, cleaned up and butt-glued into position without losing them or supergluing them to my fingers.

Thanks to Alan Ury and Scott Lowther for developing the kit and to Steven Jochums from Starship Modeler for his detailed, illustrated article on building it.

I think the toughest mass production injection molded kit was, coincidentally, another space station, the AMT/Ertl Deep Space 9. Don’t even get me started on lighting that beauty!

i count anything lol

Revell 1/48 Mosquito. Maybe I just got a bad kit, but it fought me near every step of the way. It was the first entry to the shelf of doom in quite a while.

Probably just me,but the Hasegawa 1/48 Tomcat gave me fits twice,never got one built.

No, Tojo, not just you. The Hasegawa Tomcat heads my list too. I've tried three of them, going back to right after it was first released. I finally got one finished and done a few years ago. It did fight me all the way, but I think it looks good. Soon after all that, Tamiya released their F-14A. What a difference.

Tom

Mine is the Trumpeter 1/200 Bismarck... I got one maybe 80-90% built but dropped it in a wintery storage lot while moving and broke/lost a bunch of parts. I ended up abandoning that project. 

I started a second one that I have been working on over a year. I'm hunting down/fixing accuracy errors, adding virtually every aftermarket doo-dad that's available and backdating the kit to Bismarck's pre refit form... it's been a bear of a project and is proving really, really difficult and frustrating for me. Still so far to go too! 

tomwatkins45

No, Tojo, not just you. The Hasegawa Tomcat heads my list too. I've tried three of them, going back to right after it was first released. I finally got one finished and done a few years ago. It did fight me all the way, but I think it looks good. Soon after all that, Tamiya released their F-14A. What a difference.

Tom

 

Thanks I feel better,I was real excited when it came out,maybe 88 or so,but it whipped me twice.

Do you mean the worst one we finished, or do you include the ones we gave up on and threw away?

Most frustrating?  Everything I've ever tried from Kitty Hawk.

Fujimi 1/24 BMW E3 E30. It sucked!

Almost swore off Fujimi.

Any B-17 from any manufacture. One of my favs however I never get past closing the fuselage, something about trying to paint the exterior while preserving the glass and interior. Probably the one kit in any scale I won't buy. Part respect to the plane, part redpect to my wallet.

My Alanger Yak-9 really jumps out at me.  Lot's of interior parts, vague placement instructions and NO locating indication for ANYTHING.  I swore a lot.  

Mirage Hobby PZL 11c was frustrating, mostly the PE.

Hobbycraft P-36 was frustrating, too.

Most of my frustration is with lack of skill.  And fidly bits. 

ESCI 1/48 KFIR.  Lacked detail which was okay becuase I just wanted the airframe for my agressor collection.  Lot's of gaps, filling and sanding but the worst was the reaction of the paint to the material I was using for masking - can't bag on the kit there but man that was almost a trashcan build.  Few pics:

Took a lot of work and it turned out so so... don't look too close

The ICM TB-3 Zveno.weird butt jointed sub assemblies caused alignment nightmares. 

Academy SBD that I just finished. Most pathetic instructions I've seen. But I got it done so I'm happy about that. Don't believe I'll buy another Academy model again.

philo426

The ICM TB-3 Zveno.weird butt jointed sub assemblies caused alignment nightmares. 

Oh I remember that one!  Butt joined, multi-part, CORRUGATED wings.  They had you building the thing like a balsa model, complete with spars and internal ribs.  Ugh.  But if you can get it together, you’ll have a masterpiece.

Don't know about masterpiece ,but here it is displayed at my local Hobby Shop.Decals were bad so I painted the stars and the 8 on the rudde r.  

Without a doubt the Polar Lights Bobby Allison 69 Mercury Cyclone. Nothing fit right, flash ridden, holes and pins either diffrent sizes or not aligned.

Three kits come to mind, first would be the old Soviet era (produced during the Cold War) T-60 light tank. What a terrible kit, the tracks were short shot and not just not a good model kit.

The next two were Tauro kits. The Italian Fiat 3000, a copy of the FT-17 made by Italy, while the base kit was fairly decent, the unique tracks were not made well and are short about a half inch.

Then the Tauro A7V WW1 German tank, I still have the partially built beast.

The Klara recovery vehicle, can't remember who made it. There were so much trimming and filing one could have made another few parts from them

castelnuovo

The Klara recovery vehicle, can't remember who made it. There were so much trimming and filing one could have made another few parts from them

 

That's the Mirage kit, also boxed by RPM and several other Eastern European companies. Sort of a mix and match of sprues, some of mine were an ivory white, others stark white, some were marbled like a few pieces of black dropped inside.

I bought a Maquette kit, a Boeing 307.  It was really bad.  The fuselage had a consistancy and roughness about like paper machee.  And the right half of the fuselage was an eighth of an inch higher at midpoint than the left half.  I ended up pitching the kit.

One day I hope someone else does a decent kit of that plane.

Hmmm;

 That would be and still is the Revell-S.S United States. You had places where it had hollows and no backside support and warped plastic. The other was the Finnjet ferry. Same durned problem.

Another one I thought of is the 1/72 Skarabie MiG 9/9M. It had very poor fit and extreamly large gaps. With some work you could make it into something eyecatching, but I don't have the time left to put that much effort into a subject I really don't care that much about anyway.

Hmmm;

    I also remember a YAK whatever. I think it was either Aurora or Lindberg that offered it. Lousy fit and molded in Colored plastic too. Cockpit Canopy was thick enough that many times it wouldn't fit over the molded in pilot !