When I started building models as a kid, I had no idea what I was doing. Gradually, that changed. And one of the first kits that I actually, legitimately tried at was Monogram’s venerable OS2U Kingfisher.
Since then, I’ve had a soft spot for the awkward floatplane. So when Kitty Hawk announced they would be making a new-tool Kingfisher – and in 1/32 scale no less! – I was thrilled.
When sprue shots and reviews started coming in, I was still thrilled. When I got the kit and briefly pawed through the bagged plastic, I was still thrilled. So thrilled, in fact, that I decided I was going to build this sucker for an upcoming magazine article. I even found a rather battered Kingfisher I wanted to tackle:
Then, I actually got started on it. The front and back halves of the R-985’s cylinder banks didn’t fit together because – get this – the locating pin was too big. Okay, annoying, but no real biggie. Drill the corresponding hole out a bit wider and viola.
And then I looked at what came next.
Really, Kitty Hawk? Really?
It Gets Better Worse
Okay. So far, things just seem annoying. And the Kitty Hawk OS2U has two major dings against it:
- Parts that don’t fit very well (cylinder banks, cylinder heads, pushrods that are too long…)
- Awful sprue gating
If that were it…again…just annoying. But look at this shit:
So we already have sadistic sprue gating, mediocre fit and mis-sized locating pins. And with these ingredients, the kit asks you to build an overly complicated engine and mount subassembly that forces you to paint and assemble, paint and assemble, paint and assemble ad nauseum.
But wait, there’s more! The valve covers, which fit the cylinder heads only vaguely, are also the points by which you attach the forward cowl ring. And…they don’t fit the cowl attachment points!
And on the back side, you not only have to attach spindly engine mounts to the firewall, you also have to attach the instrument panel and IP coaming to the other side, and put sandwich all of this between the fuselage halves. I’m sure there’s no chance to fuck up any alignment of anything there! Or that one very slight misalignment five steps earlier could come back to totally screw you at this point!
After you for some reason attach the cowl flaps to the fuselage (WTF), we come to the icing on the cake. Around this janky assembly, you now get to install four cowl panels. Hiding all that work, and all I’m sure without introducing a single gap of any kind.
I would barely trust Tamiya with this kind of a job…and I have every confidence they’d size their locating pins properly. Kitty Hawk, with their track record and with the experience of the opening stages of this kit?
Nope.
Engineering and Fit
It’s funny. The modeling community at large will obsess over minor points of accuracy, will deem kits with small shape problems to be garbage, but engineering and fit rarely come into play. I mean…there’s a multi-part comparison extravaganza of various 1/32 Bf 109Es up on Large Scale Planes. And it looks at elevator shape and gear bay design…but it never mentions things like, oh, the disastrous fit of the cowl on the Eduard kits.
Eduard accidentally makes their 1/48 Bf 109G-6 a 1/46 scale kit and everyone dogpiles them. HK Models makes some goofs on the shape of the Mosquito B.IV and you’d think they were committing war crimes. Trumpeter does anything and they’re attacked for it.
But when a company screws the pooch with regard to engineering and fit, somehow it’s on us, and shit like “use your modeling skills” gets tossed about to quash any dissent.
Fuck that.
If I’m going to pay $90 for a kit, I expect some level of quality. I expect shit to be molded in a way that allows me to remove parts from the sprue without breaking them. I expect parts that fit most of the time. And as bonus points, I’d like to see engineering that takes into account not only the immediate step, but the larger build as a whole. If I have to paint and then assemble, that shit better go together like lego bricks.
Now, I realize that some modelers relish the challenge of a kit like this. Cool, bully for you. I’ll fully admit that building is more a means to an end for me. And that’s certainly driving my frustration with Kitty Hawk and Italeri and others.
But…I have a larger philosophical problem with giving kitmakers a pass for shitty engineering. And it’s a simple one. I don’t like carrying water for others’ mediocrity. If I’m going to invest my time, effort and passion into a build, I want to invest it in a kit that was invested with the same in its design. It’s why I like Tamiya and Wingnut Wings so much. It’s why I’m a big fan of what Tanmodel is trying to do.
And it’s why it’ll be a long, long time before I buy another Kitty Hawk kit.
Doogs Models 
And it gives us newbie modellers a massive feeling of inferiority when the bloody things won’t go together properly. It must be us, mustn’t it? So I’m pleased on several levels with your comments. Great article.
Easy to check the length of a fuselage from a lazy inbox review. More difficult to check the cowling fit.
I purchased Kity Hawke’s Aircobra. It’s 90% finished, sitting with gloss coat on my spray table. Fuck it, straight in the bin tonight. You have reinforced how bad it went together, and like you, unlikely I’ll buy one again.
The reviews I read did not mentioned one of the build ability issues.
Tamiya or Wingnut, thank you.
Given the ever increasing cost of new kits, solid engineering should baked right in from the beginning. The best we might hope to do is to “flog and shame” the shit out of the bad designs so that the rest of us know what to expect if we’re still going to spend that kind of money.
I recently built a 1/72 Macross VF-1 Valkarie by Bandai. The fit and engineering was so good that you could put the entire kit together without glue (or paint – the sprues are multicoloured) if you were that way inclined. I realise that scifi *gundams* are not everyone’s cup of tea but it just shows what can be accomplished. Tamiya (and Bandai) are to be commended for leading the industry in that respect.
Mind you, the HK Models Mosquito doesn’t just h Ave a few minor shape issues – it’s a complete fucking disaster. I’ll generally take decent assembly and engineering over absolute accuracy every time, but sometimes it’s a fuck up too far to be worth the effort and money. That caricature Mosquito, Trumpeter’s Mig-23BN. How well they build is irrelevant to me, when they won’t even look like the real aircraft when finished. Trumpeter’s DH Hornet currently takes the biscuit. Every single shapes is laughably off. But I assembled it in 65 minutes with no trouble (for shape assessment prior to throwing it in the bin).
As worn all things there’s a year off very often. Sometimes you can accept it, sometimes you can’t.
i dont agree with you,my mossie went together very well and i have to do my modelling one handed
I REALLY want you to do the build review for this abortion on FSM, but somehow i don’t see them rushing out to publish it.. Great article! it’s a shame, as I was looking forward to buying and building this one too.. now.. not so much.
Message to Kitty Hawk: Don’t sell the bike shop yet, Orville..
I agree with you although I don’t build such big models. I have one in 32nd and it’s Tamiya’s superb Spitfire Mk.VIII. I once wrote that I don’t like the way Eduard designed some elements in their otherwise excellent Spitfires and I was told that I should start building easy kits from Hobby Boss. If I only could, I’d build Tamiya’s models exclusively for their fitting and general quality.
Dang! I just bought this kit!
Eduard will likely produce a Brassen engine set for this kit soon, but it’ll cost $60+.
I hope so. But outside of KASL nobody has really shown KH kits any resin attention.
I also think part of the problem is that a majority of kits now are CAD designed, and the build process is secondary to getting everything on sprues and in the box. Looks like TanModel actually thinks about the build when the kit is designed. Another problem with a lot of the companies now is the layout of the instructions. Some of them are just shitty – I have to put the image under my magnifier just to decipher the drawings.
As I’ve said in the past – do these bloody kit manufacturers actually take a production kit from the line and actually build it or get an ‘average’ modeller to build it? This is common production engineering practice. Answer would appear to be a big fat ‘no’.
I suggest Tamiya engineering is so good because they actually build the kits. You see pictures of Japanese at Tamiya building and painting the kits. Tamiya catalogues showed pictures of the actual completed and painted models. The stuff-ups were found at the factory. Tamiya’s production quality is excellent and is reflected in the quality of the kit and their attention to getting the details correct. Take for example, the 1/32 Mosquito where they added a small slip of paper in the kit as a correction to the cockpit door – all the slip illustrated was a small part to be painted a different colour to what the instructions stated! That’s attention to detail for you.
I don’t work in the model industry, but my educated guess would be that all manufacturers, even the lousy ones, perform all kinds of fit checks on first article runs. But you have to understand, once the injection molds are fabricated, it may not be a simple matter of a tweek here or there. Major changes to a mold could cost, I’m guessing, upwards of tens of thousands of dollars. At this point, it’s a business case. Smaller, lower volume manufacturers may not be able to afford revisions for what they consider to be minor problems.
They need to do better.
In Tamiya we trust….
I’m currently building the Kittyhawk 1/48 JAS-39 Gripen, and so far so good IMHO.
This is why the Asian companies like Kitty Hawk are rushing to get 1/32 kits out the door – there is no competition. Without competition, they can put trash out the door and people will eat them up. What are you going to compare them to? A Combat/Roberts Model vacform?
What pushed me off the Kingfisher was the rivet detail that is just not on the real thing. Preposterous
I’m totally with you on this topic Doogs. I think I am a competent modeller and well capable of dealing with the occasional fit challenge, but with a £70-100 pound kit I don’t think it unreasonable to expect the challenges to be few and far between.
I am currently building Revell’s Ju88A-4 in 1/32 scale and while it’s quite nice kit, if it had cost £75 I would not be a happy bunny, but hey, it isn’t. At £25 (special offer from Hannants!) I’ll accept some shortcomings, it’s still going to look good on completion (I hope!). My point is that some of the Chinese manufacturers (You all know who they are) seem to think they can churn out sub standard engineering and we’ll buy it by the truckload cos they release types that are not well represented by other makers. What really pisses me off is that the bastards get away with it!!
As your rant started off with Kittyhawk, I have to admit I have never built one of their offerings because whilst the release of new subjects by them has been applauded by many, I haven’t read a single build review yet that doesn’t take them to task for inaccuracy, thoughtless engineering issues and significant build issues.
Thanks for the heads up cuz this one was on my list even though it was 1/32nd scale. I, like you, have always liked this bird and wanted one. Not now I’ll tell ya that.
It’s a shame when we spend good money on a kit like this expecting to get what we pay for. Too bad. It’s REALLY too bad.
I’m struggling with an HK B-17… same rant – if you want to charge me tamiya money, you had better supply me with a tamiya like kit. HK is far FAR from that. Oh – I’ll finish it but I will never buy another HK kit ever again.
Haven’t built the 17, but I did the B-25 and it was an absolute joy in terms of engineering and fit. It was a big bastard…that part was a bit unwieldy…but it went together in a fashion approaching Tamiya-like. And absolutely blows the Kingfailure out of the water.
You’ll never finish it. 🙂
I dunno about that……this guy finishes everything he starts.
I’m glad you have given us the benefit of your experiences with this kit. It does seem strange that a company that can make the B-25 so well, can turn around and drop the ball on this one. Guess I’ll just wait until one of the big US mail order companies puts this beast on sale. Then I can feel good about all the $$ I’m saving, as I stick it all together….mostly
Just for clarification, HK Models did the 32nd scale B-25, and it is excellent.
KH Did the Kingfisher.
2 completely different organizations. Don’t have the HK B-17 yet, so not qualified to comment on that. Just don’t want HK to get more blame than it deserves.
I’m fighting against 1/48 F-35C from KH! A real nightmare… Plastic, instructions, fitting, decals and a long, long etcétera! So expensive! Unfortunatelly I’ve got the F-35B and the French Jaguar A… They probably will be soon forgotten in the stash… But KH alredy got my money!
This is a pet peeve of mine as well. I’ve seen people’s comments online about certain kits I’ve cursed my way through, and literally wondered “are we both talking about the same kit?”
A badly engineered kit can be fixed up with enough work (and I’ve done it at times), but it bugs me endlessly to have to fix something because the manufacturer made bad design choices in the first place.
There are a lot of thoughts voiced in this article that are way overdue. I’m glad to see it said publicly and to see that I am not alone in appreciating good engineering over rivet counts.
After reading this and the comments I am saddened to think I spent money on the KH P-39. I haven’t started it yet, so, I’m not pissed off…yet
I sold mine (and my F-86D). It’s maddening. I want nothing more than to like Kitty Hawk kits. The Kingfisher is a dream subject of mine. But not like this…
Thanks for posting this – it was funny as well as useful. My husband was really psyched about building that kit, but now his birthday present is going to come from Wingnut Wings. Side note re: model companies actually building their own kits to test them: I don’t know if this is still the case, but a few years ago Eduard didn’t test them in-house, but had the guy at the local fire station build them!
KittyHawk is the ISiS of the modellers world…. They deserve a global internet ranting campaign against them.. After the first two-three released overpriced disasters, a sane mind running the company would have fired the responsible engineers. But no, they still push the bullshit on us modellers while robbing the crap out of our wallets…. I hope more and more people turn to the net, reconsider a K.H purchase thus avoiding falling in their trap.
I once wrote KittyHawk with some soft minor complaints and actually got a reply.. “You should not worry dear modeller, in 5-6 years our company KittyHawk will have killed the competetition.. It will start with Japan”… Speechless….
ISIS of the modelers world………………now THAT’S funny! HAHAAAA. Woooo Hoooo! I’ll have to remember that one. lol
I find Kitty Hawk’s stubbornness truly puzzling, especially given the involvement of people like Bert Kinzey and Tommy Thomason on some of their projects. Really not sure if they’re listening to comments from the US Market, or if they have selective hearing in just a limited frequency range…
The first KH kit attempted was the attractive “looking” 1/48 Sepecat Jaguar A (French variant); absolute disaster in kit form…needless to say it was far from cheap… so nothing until earlier this year – with the cheaper 1/48 Super Etendard…well, that’s an equal disaster… so, KH would need to pay for Salvomodels to do any more of their junk…
To beat the Japanese, KH need to sell their kits first…here’s one that won’t be buying their stuff any time soon…
To see my reviews of both kits, check out Salvomodels’ facebook page
Even more evidence.. My ever sworn oath to boycotte KittyHawk eternally continues…..
Hi.
How do Hobby Boss kits go together? I see they are about to release a Fliescher Storck – after building Tamiya’s 1/48th, which is probably my best ever build, I’m keen to do one in 1/32nd.
However, if the quality is shit, I won’t buy it.
Cheers
I honestly think that Kitty Hawk design their kits on some 3D CAD sort of software, then basically just send it off to some sub-contractor with a post-it note attached: “Get this done in 1/32. Budget as low as humanly possible”.
They don’t seem to believe in test-shots or even test-builds, as they would highlight the vast majority of the problems they seem to produce. It’s all just designed to be moulded as cheaply as possible and bugger the consequences. If that means a part has to be split into 2 and joined in an – I’m being charitable hear – unique method, then so be it. As soon as the box leaves the factory, it’s the customers fault if it fails to glue together without a crowbar and acetylene torch.
There’s definitely a, “Now Now Now!” mentality with Chinese manufacturing. Knock it out quick, and if its crap, negotiate down the purchase price. And it’s not just us Americans who’ve picked up on this; the Taiwanese are keenly aware of it, too.
Tamiya moves at a glacial pace when it comes to kit development, but the quality of the end product is usually worth the wait. Considering how long it takes me to finish a model, combined with the size of my kit stash, i think slower is better. Hasegawa is kind of the same way.
This is not to denigrate Chinese companies like Kinetic, AMK, Great Wall or even (in limited cases) Trumpeter/HobbyBoss. Those people do have some talented engineers and with one exception they usually get things right more often than they get things wrong. KH seemed to have a hit with the OV-10 Bronco, and the early F-94C was not too bad but from that point on they’ve been lurching from release to release.
Nobody wants to see a company like KH fail, but by the same token nobody wants to see the same mistakes being made over and over again.
So its not my modeling skills??
http://www.hyperscale.com/2017/galleries/os2u1lg32_1.htm
Huh.
Point?
Well, quite a difference of opinion. One fellow says it has “shitty engineering” and “mediocre fit” and another guy (who finished the kit) says “fit is good” and “wing’s and tailplane’s fit rivaled Tamiya”. You both agreed that the locating pins were too large and the instructions stunk.
What’s interesting is that this isn’t about whether butter pecan ice cream is good or not, it’s opinions based on objective facts. Both bought the kit because they really wanted to build a Kingfisher, but one found the kit to be fundamentally unbuildable while the other appears to have enjoyed it.
At times I’ve sympathized with both sides of the “you only need basic modeling skills” or “a little bit of work” excuse for disappointing kits, but I’ve found that even Tamiya kits still need seam clean-up, scraping and sanding the faying surfaces, squaring up corners, cutting off most alignment pins, and dry-fitting. Most people – and I mean most plastic modelers – don’t spend the time to do that. It’s to Tamiya’s credit that even if you don’t you can still get a pretty good model, but without these truly basic skills anything less than a perfect starting point can become an exercise in frustration.
I recently returned to model building and really fancied the 1/32 Kitty Hawk OV-10 Bronco, I did as much online research as I could and found glowing praise for the model and some really nice finished examples, so I pulled the trigger and spent ($130 CAD, $100 US) on it. I started building and was indeed impressed with the level of detail offered in the cockpit, however when I started installing said cockpit into the fuselage, that’s when the trouble began… locator pins too big, parts just not fitting correctly… I assumed that I had made a mistake along the line and that I just didn’t have the skill level to complete (despite being a seasoned modeler of 35+ years, just not always plastic model kits). I put the kit to one side and cracked on with a Tamiya 1/32 scale F4u-1d… the difference was astonishing, everything fit perfectly and the only issues I encountered was the use of aftermarket parts, which I managed to fix.
I’m so glad to see someone (Doog) posting a real opinion! For the record, I agree with most of your rants! Keep at it.
I’ve heard nothing but horror stories from those who’ve built the Bronco. To me, it’s emblematic of the problem with in-box reviews – no aspect of the actual build gets taken into account, so you get a bunch of “highly recommended” based solely on detail and (sometimes) accuracy.
Im going to save up for this kit and I may not like it but I will put up with the struggles because i adore the Kingfisher
Hello, I am a subscriber to your youtube channel. The news that Kitty Hawk closes caught my attention, is it true? Do you know the cause?
I was thinking of buying a SH60-B because it can be represented by the Spanish army.
I already have a Dauphine 2 for that very reason.
What is your opinion about this manufacturer, I see that this model is very bad… very very bad!!!
Thank you and I follow your channel, I love it!
I bought this kit years ago and am now just starting it. I thought it was maybe my lapse of years in not building much that was an issue but this kit is just frustrating. Putting pushrod covers on the cylinder heads and then not being able to attach the cowling was frustrating. The directions are poor and I hard time figuring out where the engine frame attached to the engine. Luckily someone had posted a build of this kit. The engine also has some very small pieces that are almost impossible to glue in place. Getting pieces off the sprue resulted in some broken pieces. There’s a lot of nice detail but a lot of that gets hidden.
Heh. Now that the zombie of KH has reissued it, I’ve actually picked it up again, with an eye toward using 3D design/printing to address a lot of the kit’s frustrations. Might take awhile before I get to it. But a 3DP Wasp Junior would go a long way toward making this kit less maddening.