If you are just building the ships, this is a nice, easy, and fun weekend kit to build. It has few parts, the fit is good and the detail of the iron plates on the ships is excellent. If you want to build the diorama like on the box art, I imagine it would take a little longer. I haven’t decided if I’m going to create the diorama or not. For now the ships are just sitting on their stands. That being said, it does lack a few details to increase it end look. For example the CSS Merrimack had a rail around its upper deck. There isn’t one in the kit so I tried to make one by cutting up some needles and using them as rails. It was my first attempt at something like this and if you don’t look to close it doesn’t look bad.

This is a very easy kit to build. Each ship only has maybe 12 or so pieces to it. Since the construction is so easy, it frees you up to concentrate on the details. The molding on the hulls and deck is very good - making it easy to weather them accurately. Even the harbor water diorama base is well molded and lends itself to easy detail work if one is so inclined. One warning though, if you build the entire running train (propeller and rudder) on the Merrimac, you will have to cut some clearance in the diorama base to make room for the rudder.

Had a lot of fun building these two ships. Just getting back into the hobby after many decades and this was simple enough I could play around with the smoke and flags.