New Box, Old Mould - The Pitfalls of Kit Selection

A few days ago I was involved in an on-line discussion regarding the re-issuing of old moulds which I thought I'd revisit on this blog.

The discussion started with a commenter's experience of building, in their words, the awful Airfix 1:48 scale Hawker Fury, which contains plastic from 1980. It then turned to whether or not it was an underhand tactic by model makers to sell kits that are well past their sell-by date and is such practice unfair on customers?

New Box, Old Plastic

To start with lets look at things from the model companies point of view. They have a product to sell, they exist to make money. Straight forward and to point I know, but that is the reality and I see little point in blaming them. It's easy for us to shift the blame to them, to call them underhand but in the end it's up to us, as customers, to make informed choices.  If we do then we won't be buying the inferior products and they will cease to sell them.

Certain companies seem to have different approaches to re-boxes, in my experience they are:

• Academy - For years Academy have been producing budget kits of a mixed quality. In recent years they've started releasing more expensive and higher quality kits but I've not yet seen any of their range retired. They've changed the catalogue numbers of some their older kits but released them exactly the same as before so I'm not even sure that counts as re-boxing them.
• Airfix - The near bankrupt Airfix of a few years ago quite obviously couldn't afford to do much else other than sell their old models. But now there's been a significant cull of older models. Although some still remain I suspect that there will be replacements in the pipeline.
• Eduard - A newer manufacturer with an emphasis on quality. There kits seem to retired fairly quickly.
• Hasegawa - It feels like Hasegawa never change. I've bought many of their kits and sold them all on, never actually building a single one. Alongside their steady range of new releases new box, old model seems to be what they do.
• Revell - The re-box kings. I rarely buy Revell models for the reason so many of them are so old, and in many case not even their models to begin with. I think their recent Star Wars licence will keep them earning for the foreseeable future along with the loyalty of the American market toward the old Monogram kits. But Revell just isn't a name that's associated with quality in my opinion. Which is a shame, because the few new kits they make are actually very good, if you can find them.
•  Tamiya - Like Hasegawa they never seem to change, we see a few new kits each year which are of a high standard. However their older models were years ahead of their competitors when they first came out so they seem to still hold their own against today's kits. Interesting in my preferred scale, 1:72, I have noticed a reduction in the range recently (mostly the Italeri kits they re-boxed for the Asian market) so they obviously feel some of the older kits are no longer of a high enough quality.

I do believe it's no coincidence that that model kits have moved in terms of quality so much in the last 10 or so years alongside the growth of the internet side of scale modelling. By participating in forums and groups, by writing blogs and posting photographs and so on, are we already driving the change so many of us desire?

And then there are on-line resources such as Scalemates. This site is a model kit database which gives a complete time-line of many kits, allowing us to see just how old the plastic inside that box is.

One counterargument I often hear is the argument that bad kits will put off beginners from continuing with the hobby. I can see the point, after the first kit I built for this blog you may wonder why I continued. Well I do believe this is a hobby that requires a certain amount of perseverance and patience anyway. Anyone who quits after one setback will never be a modeller, so that's one reason. Secondly the majority of model companies have already figured this out which is why we have the starter kit. These are the kits I always see younger modellers with in my local hobby shop. Interestingly this seems more common among companies targeting Western audiences, maybe those beginners in Asia have the character I referred to in my first point or maybe model making is more embedded in their culture?

So with all that in mind I guess it's time to wrap this post up. To finish I will say, if you really do want to build an Airfix 1:48 scale Hawker Fury from 1980 now's your chance. I very much doubt this kit will be around for much longer.