About this site
Ships are almost unique as a plastic modelling subject in that many subjects are only represented by kits 30,40 or even 50 years old. Ships and boats have
always had less appeal to the mass market than planes, cars and tanks - and furthermore, due to increased tooling costs and greater expectations of accuracy
and detail, manufacturers were far more adventurous in terms of subject matter in the 1960s and 70s than they are now. (Though, to be fair, in the last 5 years
or so the plastic ship kit market has finally started to pick up again - with many new 1/350 subjects, a good handful in 1/200, 1/144 and 1/72, and a huge range
of new 1/700 kits)
The quality and accuracy of these kits can vary widely (as an example, Revell's 1/96 sailing ships from the 1950s are as good as or better than anything produced since,
whilst many Lindberg kits even from the 1970s are abysmal - though they still might be worth building if the subject and/or scale appeals); furthermore,
many of them are hard to find and often quite expensive, partly due to them appealing as much to collectors of vintage kits as to modellers who actually
want to build a model of the ship represented by the kit! Hence I thought it would be useful to take some photos of the old kits I own, and make them available
on the Internet - so prospective buyers of these kits can see exactly what they're getting in the box.
This page is a collection of simple reviews/previews of plastic model ship kits, with photos of the kit parts and box art along with a brief description of the kit and the vessel it represents.
The kits covered by the reviews on this site are mostly older toolings - whether out of production or otherwise - along with lesser-known current kits from Eastern European and Far Eastern manufacturers.
I don't intend to cover any of the new 1/350 kits from the likes of Trumpeter, Dragon and Hasegawa, as most of these are very well covered by other modelling review sites such as Modelwarships.com (see the Links page for more).
However, I will be adding reviews of these manufacturer's earlier and less well known kits - such as Trumpeter's 1/200 Chinese warships - and of any new-release kits in 1/200 or larger scale
All of the kits previewed are ones from my own "stash", so the majority are subjects and scales in my area of interest; though as I'm also building a collection of "representative" WW2 and post-war models in waterline 1/700 scale, I may add a 1/700 scale section to the site in future, again focusing
on older and less well known kits such as those by Matchbox and Italeri.
Many of the kits previewed on this website have been re-issued by several different manufacturers over the years; for the sake of clarity, in most cases I have sorted kits according to their original manufacturer.
Note that all of the previews on this are purely subjective and are my personal opinion of what the kit is like! As I haven't yet built most of the kits yet, most of them are "in-box" reviews, but if I've built the kit I'll add information on fit, quality of instructions, etc.
This webpage is still a work in progress, and I will eventually expand it to include all the kits I own which I think are worth including! I'll also improve the site layout in future to make it easier to navigate and will add to the Links page.
Why would I put the time and effort into creating a webpage like this? Because when I got interested in ship modelling a few years ago, and started finding out about all the interesting
old kits that were out there, I wished there was a site with information and photographs of the kits to give me an idea of what exactly they were like! There are a handful of reviews of older kits scattered around the Internet (on Modeling Madness for example), and various pictures of built examples on sites like Modelwarships.com,
but for many of these kits there was virtually nothing in the way of information available.
Now that I've managed to acquire most of the kits I have been searching for, I decided to photograph them and make the photos available on the Internet for other potential builders to view - before I build them and it's too late! Anyhow, I hope this site proves a useful resource to ship modellers.
Finally, this website is mainly intended as a source of information on kits, rather than the history of the ships they represent - hence please forgive any errors or omissions in the latter! Any advice on corrections would be appreciated, however. (See the Links page for links to many ship-related reference sites)