This is a Lindberg kit…and my first/second ship kit. (I’m still on the hull of the 1/76 Corvette).
How bad is this kit on the quality scale? I’m finding myself filling all kinds of holes, sanding off pin marks etc, etc. To me, there’s even very little detail.
Is this normal? Should I even bother finishing it?
When this kit was new forty to fifty years ago it was probably the best kit on the market. Times have changed. The manufacturing standards have changed. The modelers and their expectations have changed.
You can build it. It will take a lot of work to correct and improve it.
Jeff Herne wrote here earlier this week that after all the work he put into the Lindberg Blue Devil destroyer corrrecting it and improving it; it was still a Lindberg kit.
You want a larger scale Hood - go for the Heller kit. There is no 1:350 scale kit on the market as an alternative.
You can always take that Lindberg Hood and your .22 rifle down to the local pond and pretend you are the Bismarck.
I bought this kit a while ago, intending to improve and detail it via scratchbuilding - I didn’t realise
at the time that Heller made a much better kit of the same ship. Last month I found the Heller Hood for £10
at a kit sale and decided to buy this and sell the Lindberg kit on eBay (I got around £10 for it, so recovered the
cost of the Heller kit).
If it were the only kit of the Hood available in this scale, it might be worth persevering with (like the 1/125
Fletcher) but there doesn’t seem much point considering there is a vastly superior kit which is around the same price range and isn’t much harder to find, even though the Heller kit isn’t perfect by today’s standards.
I’d still like to build the Lindberg Fletcher, however bad it is - it’s the only really large-scale destroyer kit available. (Even if I have to scratchbuild virtually everything above the deck…) However, finding one at an affordable price in the UK isn’t easy.
I built the HMS hood by heller…it’s not exactly full of detail either and you’ll have to replace the plastic rails with pe ones to get it to look right…you’ll get brass anchor chain…that’s as exciting as it comes…
Overall the kit fits ok…buy very basic…I hear there might be a hood in 1/350 somewhere in the near future? and right now there’s a 1/700 out…that’s the best bet…