most frustrating kit you have ever built

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. 

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.

Fujimi 1/24 BMW E3 E30. It sucked!

Almost swore off Fujimi.

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

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

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.

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! 

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

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

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.

i count anything lol

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!

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.

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

Revell P-61 Black Widow.