Just spotted this on www.steelnavy.com:
“Hawk has now bought Lindberg, and will release next year the LCT, LST, LSD and Minesweeper. The old Marx Sea Witch, the large scale Chris Craft Cabin Cruiser, Shrimp Boat, Lightship Nantucket, Robert E Lee steamer, and the Graf Zeppelin kit in injection molding (as it was originally done) with an insert for the passenger cabin. The Hawk guys were receptive towards the idea of doing a weapons set or update for both the Blue Devil and the Minesweeper. They are also going to be revamping the Yorktown kit in the future. They have an ambitious schedule of kits planned.”
Sounds like very good news for anyone with an interest in building models of these ships and who doesn’t want to pay kit collector’s prices on eBay! There are some very interesting subjects in that list which are unlikely to be produced in styrene form by other manufacturers any time soon, certainly not in scales as large as the Lindberg kits.
Regarding the I have the recent Lindberg reissue of the LCT (don’t have a LST yet) and was lucky enough to find second-hand built examples of the LSI and LSD, but the 1/125 scale minesweeper (USN WW2 Admirable-class) is one I’ve wanted to build for some time, as a fan of both large-scale ship models and small “auxiliary” warships. Currently, it routinely sells for over $50 on eBay far more than this for older collectible boxed examples.
Lindberg have a lot of other interesting ships in their back catalogue (Coast Guard cutter, USS Carronade, LSU, fire boat, tuna clipper, etc. not to mention many ex-Pyro and Aurora sailing ships) perhaps we’ll eventually see some of these reissued - as it is, it’ll be great to see the abovementioned kits finally back on the market.
(Judging by the reference to a passenger cabin, I assume the “Graf Zeppelin” referred to is a WW1 airship, not the never-completed German WW2 aircraft carrier?)