USS Arizona Battleship

This was my first ship build in the modeling world, and being the novice ship modeler that I was at the time. I took on this challenge thinking it would be easy. But it turns out I was wrong, there are a quite a few small pieces and I lost a few and made a mess of the model. BUT! After bettering my abilities with more models I came back to this one and perfected it on my second try! LOVE the model and the american dreadnought type battleships!

I purchased this kit from a brick and mortar store in NJ, to replace my previous kit which was destroyed by a visiting demon child. I began my usual form and painted the base items first then began assembling to find that the two primary hull segments were so severely warped that it could not be joined as directed or used. I purchased another one and it too had the same problem of warped primary hull segments. I contacted the manufacturer, REVELL GERMANY, and informed them of the problem. They took my name and thanked me for my call and support. That was over 3 months ago and to this day I never received replacement parts or a coupon or even a simple apology. I wish that the actual manufacturers provided the same quality Customer Support and Responsiveness as Hobbylinc does.

I just finished putting one of these together. Some say this is a good kit for beginners but I don't completely agree with that. The reasons are that, this being a late 50's revision, the molds have seen a LOT of use and as such I encountered problems with my kit. Several sprues looked to have had mold halves that had slipped 1-2mm causing the halvs of individual pieces to be offset. On some parts this did not cause an issue but on others it took quite a bit of trimming, filling, and reshaping to make the part look and fit right. this was especially true of the anchor chain reels. This kit also suffers from some old assembly methodology which REALLY stands out when you go to put the superstructure together. You'll note that the pieces meet halfway up the bulkheads leaving with a bunch of oddly misshaped windows and nasty seam lines that need attention. And beyond that the quality of the details in the molded pieces is average at best. Coupled those issues with the fact that the hull halves didn't fit together correctly and had to be braced, clamped, and then filled and smoothed and I believe this to be a kit for the intermediate or better modeler. Now with all that being said I did find this to be a fun kit to build. And once it's done a fairly good representation of the ship overall. But I did spend most of my time fixing problems. But the kit was cheap so it's really just a practace of getting what you pay for. you could buy two of these kits for what the next least expensive kit costs. And that one is probably 1/700 scale. And anything in 1/350 scale will set you back anywhere from $50+ depending on manufacturer. So would I personally buy this kit again? For $15, ABSOLUTELY! But I wouldn't buy it for a young modeler or somebody just starting. Wait till they have a few kits under their belt before handing them one of these. In the right hands this can be a really nice build with a dirt cheap buy-in.