Hardest? Does that mean bad, challenging, or just time consuming/
Bad- A couple of AMT cars I bought from Round 2. Hood will not close over the engines,
No locator pins/ holes for the trim. I guess we didn’t care when we were pimply virgins in the 60’s.
Challenging- any wood plank-on-bulkhead ship.
Time consuming- I’m on year ten of the plastic 1/100 Heller HMS Victory. About normal schedule.
Bill
For me, it was DML’s 1/48 Me-262 single seat night fighter prototype. Challenging fit, bulletproof stainless steel PE, and it was being built for a contest. I detailed both exposed engines and tried PE seat belts for the first time. In the end, the build was an unpleasant experience.
The other kit that really kicked my butt was Bandai’s 1/60 Perfect Grade Gundam GP-01. Soooo many parts, sooo many subassemblies, and though I called in help to finish it, it couldn’t end soon enough. So after that, no more Perfect Grade kits.
Tauro’s A7V Sturmpanzer WW1 tank. That thing is a beast.
Heller’s 1/100 Soleil Royal. I’ve had a love/hate relationship with it since 2012 and it still isn’t fully rigged. In a moment of weakness I also started their Victory. It too languishes undone.
There are two, tied for the hardest, the Mephistofele race car and the Benz 1886 Motorwagon.
The Mephistofele because there were so many very small parts, and the fit was not that great. The Benz had a very flimsy frame and even flimsier wheel rims. You have to dish the PE spokes to the right cone angle. There is a jig provided, but it does not allow for springback of the hardened brass. The spoke ends are sanwhitched between the plastic half-rims. When the wheels came out of the jig the rims snaked around instead o staying in one plane. I had to bend many of the spokes further. Of course, with harded brass you have to overbend a lot, and that would break the fragile rims!
For me , the hardest kit would have to be the Pyro Natches steamboat.
Nothing wanted to fit, and a few parts are definitely out of scale.
I went through HECK trying to scratch build my own grand staircase, because the kit supplied stairs were crap !!!
Most challenging? I’ll second the Dragon 1/35 Scud kit. Lots of fiddly over engineered working sub assemblies. That one was many times build part, put it away for awhile to recover my sanity.
Self inflicted? Monogram 1/48 B-26B. Not because of the kit itself, but because I got the idea to super detail and scratch build most all of the interior- cockpit, bombardier area, navigator/radio compartment, waist & tail gunners sections, wheel wells, etc. If it was even possibly remotely visible from the exterior, I built it. So lots of time later, I had a gorgeous model, but man was it a long involved process to get there.
Fought me all the way? Maquette 1/35 T-34/76 1941/42 Stz production. Lots of surgery needed… measure twice, cut once, clean up and repair that… repeat… almost threw that one against a block wall multiple times, but… no model will defeat me!
I have been building airplanes and cars for about six years. The Tamyia 1/12 scale Ferrari 312T and the ELF 6 wheeler are by far my most difficult builds. The difficulty is due to the fact that both models have hundreds of parts, most require individual attention and painting. Also, due to the large scale of the models, the models scream out, “Detail me, detail me, detail me.”
Tojo, that’s just me. Don’t let my comment dissuade you from getting the kit and having a good time building it. Sometimes I get lazy and I want to do a build that goes together more quickly than the P-38 kit.
Second that, BrandonK!
Teenage Modeler, have no fear about that kit, and about Tamiya kits in general. They are engineered very well. So you’ll get good practice with a Tamiya kit, because you don’t have to fight the kit, but you can exercise your skills and build confidence. Then you’ll be ready when you pick up a truly difficult kit.
What’s the Magnum doing?
Typical python, laying in wait…,.
Now I was in 4th grade, probably 9 years old, and one my aunt’s gave the Monogram Wright Flyer to build. Wow, was I impressed. But skills were not there but boy was I impressed with models! I still have not built one, or ever bought one. The next one that comes to mind is the 1967 AMT kit of the old Starship USS Enterprise. Yeah, I built it, in 1967 but boy the warp nacelles just were horrible to fit. It looked like the USS Constellation after it met the Doomsday machine. I may have been in the 8th grade then. (Just like the TV show, ha. No budget). I have not recently had any issues, just walk away and cool down and it will work out. Of course, I do mostly armor and planes. By the way, I’ve done two of the Tauro A7V’s, one won 1st place in a contest.
Its presence in my workshop discourages people from sitting in my chair, touching my tools, spilling paint, scratching my freshly painted projects, handling the completed models, or making wisecracks about me being too old to play with toys. Faster than explaining the rules, more effective than printing up a sign.
And it scares the hell out of the gremlins that live under my bench. That’s always a plus.
Huh! good to know Baron! I will surely have fun with my P-47.
Haha! That always happens to me (Not always, but occasionally).
ROFLMAO!!!
For me, the biggest PITA kit I’ve ever had is the Collect-Aire F-108 in 1/48 scale.
My first and almost LAST resin kit.
(Confession; I bought the Anigrand F-108 in 1/72 but I’m not enthralled with it. Probably gonna end up scratch building the wings.)
The Matchbox 1/72 Handley Page Heyford (an inter-war biplane heavy bomber). I bought this as something to occupy me whilst staying with relatives for a few months, when I was a teenager. I got the fuselage & wings assembled individually, but bringing them together at the same time as fitting the struts proved beyond me, as I didn’t have the three pairs of hands that seemed necessary. It went in the bin & I’ve never been moved to try that one again.
I built the AFV 20 mm version of the Wiesel and I thought it was a pretty decent kit, some real tiny PE parts though. The odd thing was that it was molded in white due to the UN markings. I would have preferred the light olive green kit the TOW version was molded in.
We ought to do a group build of known poor kits and call it “Bad Dogs”.