That Modelcraft F-82 makes the worst Revellogram kit seem like a “shake-n-bake”. I know what ya mean…if I could get another one real cheap and knowing what I know now maybe Id give er another go…
REAL cheap is what I paid for it, lol… Think it was like 12.00 or somethig close to it… Monogram would never send a kit like that one out the door…
I think I paid about the same for mine. I`ve seen them on Ebay for $15-$30 ! I wish Monogram would make a 1:48 Twin Mustang…maybe the nightmares would stop…
Well, they just re-released the old F-82 in 1/72, so I wouldn’t look for one from them in 1/48 until about… Never…
My nightmare kit was a 1/72 scale AWACS plane I built for the model airplane club back in High school. Me and another kid, Eric, worked on it for over a month! It had previously been started by another student and they did a piss poor job! For some reason they had thought that the two wings were supposed to be glued together, never mind that a fuselage had to go in the middle! They used a ton of glue too, to the two wings were very much bonded together. TO top that off, we didn’t have saws, just some dinky hobby knives we had to hack away with.
Once we got the wings apart, we found out that idiot student glued the fuselage together without installing the canopy first! (it fit from the inside) so while we were figuring out how to wedge the canopy in there it broke in half. That actually helped us get it to fit, but now the clear plastic was fogged with the plastic glue (all we had were the testors tube glue, btw) with a big crack down the middle. We just left it figuring we were gonna paint over the glass panels with silver anyway.
Once we glued the wings to the fuselage (which was an iffy fit because of all the hacked off plastic on the attachment edge) we found out one of them had a lovely warp to it. We lacked the knowledge and ability to fix it, so we just left it. We then worked on gluing the engines to the wings. Those actually went on pretty nice if I recall. Then Sgt came in (he was hosting the club in the AFJROTC room) and said, " those engines are on the French and export planes. If you want an American AWACS, it uses the other engines"
So another week was spent hacking off the incorrect engines and replacing them with the American ones. One of the engines took a sliver of the wing plastic with it as we removed it too. Then we went onto the aerials and the big radar dish on top…which the directions for placing were very vague. We had to look up pictures of the actual plane to figure out where the big dish went. Even then the two legs of its stand didn’t really sit right on the fuselage.
The painting went off without too much of a hitch. I mixed some left over grays together with this metallic blue and got a really neat color out of it. Sgt really liked it too. The AWACS radar dish did give us trouble in that the white paint kept cracking on us.
We finally finished with the paint and decals and hung it up from the ceiling…then I noticed we forgot to repaint the glass!
I recall one piece of French armor that I did, a small , 1/35th Renault UE (f) tankette that had been modified by the Germans to launch rockets… It was a “Mixed-Media” kit, with ABS, styrene, P/E brass, and resin parts, and indy-link resin tracks…
While it built up rather nicely, once I got it painted and weathered, but the actual construction was a nightmare with the instruction-sheet being in French, and the exploded-view drawings were pretty poor… At any rate, I wanted to show the driver’s hatch open, which meant some interior detail had to be built, so I did seat and transmission (tranny’s a Panzer IV piece w/ brass wire shift lever).
And it was SMALL!
Here’s the track with a 1/35th Marder and Flakpanzer for size-comparison prior to painting and adding the rocket-launchers… All the parts required lots of sanding to get them to fit…
I’m working through 3 Revell F-14s. They are bad. But I have seen worse.
The only kit I ever trashed was the 1/48 Testors F-4G. The fit was bad, but salvageable. However, before I started working on the many seams I stepped back, looked at it and thought about it. The cockpit was awful, the detail seemed soft, the kit weapons were weak, the decals were nothing to brag about. I decided I was better off scrapping it and buying the Hasegawa. Which I did. The Testors kit just wasn’t worth the time or the putty.