Anybody know why Miniart, stopped making their buildings?
I thought way good, strange deal.
Thanks
Jeff
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I’m not sure Jeff, but I can not find kit 36056 at all . My local hobby shop has the single building on the left of the pic below but that’s it. I’m trying to use it in a diorama I have planned but I have another plaster building from Royal model that I will have to modify. Could be production problems due to the war?
Many online places I’ve checked say discontinued or out of stock. I don’t know if it’s the case with their other buildings as they do have an extensive line of diorama products, but this one is impossible to find. Maybe someone else will have better luck??
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I doubt it is war-related as they are still releasing other products. Maybe they weren’t selling well enough to keep them in production?
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I have 36015 Village Diorama Base for auction (if anyone’s interested).
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The MiniArt buildings were fairly difficult to find in stock before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in my experience. I don’t think they were all that popular.
FWIW
In 2020, I acquired a couple of MA buildings and found them very disappointing. They basically looked like a thick vac-formed sheet of plastic. Extremely niche items in my opinion for the pair I purchased. Gave both away to be rid of them and free up stash space.
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Judging by the comments of the local importer for Greece, who has been dealing with models for over 40 years, those kits never had a strong selling point. People who build dioramas did not like them because of the amount of work and detailing required on them and most of us do not add this kind of scenery to our models.
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Although they (usually) built up into good looking structures, they are very labor-intensive to build, especially when it came to 90 degree corners. The plastic was also covered with “pimples” from the vacu-forming process, and when you sanded them down, resulted in pin-holes remaining! 
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I’ve heard many similar complaints about their building kits and figured I’d just put in the work to get it respectable. I have no experience with any of their buildings
at all so this would have been my first. I chose that particular building because it looked closest to the one I’m trying to replicate for a diorama. I do have their brick wall kit but haven’t touched it yet. It is an option for the project I have in mind but I felt it was too boring for what I was trying to accomplish.
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I agree with everything said, right down to the pimples. But clearly MA provided only the basic structure & never pretended them to be complete – which was fine because you could customise & extemporise as desired, often with a bunch of wreckage. And of course some of MA’s accessories such as furniture. I won’t use this as another excuse to show some old work but I couldn’t have done a couple of my dios without them.
The plain fact is there never were enough diorama-ists to make their range viable, and probably fewer & fewer are still interested these days, but when I was in the market they were the only worthwhile game in town.
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