Ive been building kits for 60 years. Give or take.
My current build is a RFM Firefly. Well Ive had several goes over the past four days trying to assemble the darn tracks. I can build the segments but putting those segments together has beaten me to capitulation. (Option to to simply glue them and give up on working tracks).
So i either bin it or build it without tracks. It will be the first kit EVER that has beaten me.
So give me some comfort. Tell me how many, if any, you have simply given up on?
I think I tried it in 88 when it first came out,and again in 99 when I got better.It probably was me because I have seen some good ones,but from what I remember,I couldnt get stuff to fit,I think I even had trouble closing the fuselage,trouble with the intakes,just frustrating.
I would say in my 30 plus years of building, I’ve tossed maybe 5 in the process of building/finishing. Some have fallen and been damaged beyond my desire to repair, others I just gave up interest on and tossed them. Now, the number of kits in my stash that are started and usually stopped at a painting stage, probably in the 80% of my 200+ kits!
I throw out models semi-regularly. With card models, catastrophe can come at any moment. With plastic models, failure usually occurs during painting or track installation.
Just last night, I was building tracks for a Hobby Boss T29E1. The model is not that great. The tracks do not fit the sprockets. Track pins break easily causing track runs to fall apart. I seriously considered dropping the whole thing into the recycle bin and may still do so.
Dragons Scud TEL is half finished. I used some two-component putty on it (Verlinden?) and
I suspect that vile stuff had fine sand or something in it. It wrecked the files I used, the putty took off more from the files than the files took from the putty. Wheels are horrible by todays standards but now there are resin wheels for the Trumpeter kits that could be made to fit.
I will try to save that kit.
An Airfix Cessna on floats, some Airfix helicopters (1/72)
Horrible kit detail was bad, miss matched moulds, locator pins especially for the gun system didn’t line up, went in the bin.
And this:
Weird plastic that the glues tried didn’t want to bond, and a fictional cockpit among other things.
Most recent though was this:
Banana shaped fuselage half, hold the tail together and there was a 2inch gap at the nose or viz-versa, and a huge step and the wing root wing join of about 5mm.
The one that I got totally fed up with was Dragon’s first Nashorn. I worked on the kit and worked on it, I even tried an aftermarket “upgrade”, no luck. I finally took it to our burn barrel and dumped a gallon of gas on it and lit it. That sucker burned for 2 hours, and I had to replace the burn barrel.
