Never heard of this company until about a month ago. New additions at the LHS I built this for. The hellcat is straight out of box, nothing added and only basic modeling skills applied. This is so the customer can see what they are getting for their 14 dollors. I lightened the dark sea blue to show more detail and lightly accented the recessed panel lines. The fit on this kit is excellent, as good as many of the tamiya kits I have built. Very easy to build and the seams are hidden for the most part on panel lines. External detail is about average, but the cockpit detail is pretty weak. The decals you get give you one choice and it’s not the aircraft shown on the box or the instruction sheet. The sheet only really contains the the us marking and double zero numbers for the most part.
If you are loooking for an easy build, don’t like raised detail, and are on a budget these are the kits for you. With little effort you can build up an very good closed canopy aircraft that will look good on your desk top. Also, if you are a big scratch builder and want a solid base to go on this would be my choice. With aftermarket decals, and some scratch time you could build up an excellent hellcat and not have to deal with raised detail. Finally at 14 dollors a pop you could make a 1/48 scale carrier diorama with a few of these sitting on a partly built deck. I
I’m not a hellcat expert so don’t know how accurate it is against some of the others out there. This is only the second time I have built one. I am currently building about three basic kits for them to display and though this one might be of interest. Others on the build list are revell 1/48 spitfire MK.ll, P-40 tigershark.
I had read horrible reviews of Arii and I had the FW-190 in my stash and when I built it it turned out great, to my surprise. I like them a lot and have since bought a few more including the Hellcat. Glad to see it turned out well. Nice job on the build.
The neat thing about the ARII kit is that it is one of the few if not the only Hellcat kit that has the fuselage shape right on the top just forward of the fin. Most kits have a straight shape right up to the fin, but the line should change on the section of skin between the rivet lines forward of the fin. This shows very well on phoenix7187’s photos.
