Curtiss H-16

This 1/72 scale kit comes from a familiar Ukrainian model company called Roden. A lot of their kits I’ve worked on are either hit or miss and this one in my opinion is the latter. The pros for this kit are as follows: You have four paint schemes to choose from and the one I did is on the cover on the box called A-845, U.S. Navy, 1920. The other three paint schemes are U.S. A-1032, based at Lough Foyle, 1918; U.S. K-29, based at Killingholme 1918; and s/n N4892, based at Felixstowe, May 1918 from Britain. The decals were very easy to get off the paper and apply to the kit. For the most part, painting the aircraft was fine. The cons for this kit are as follows: The rudder decal’s shape was wrong. I had to trim the decal and paint what was left of it. The instructions are just plain incomprehensible. Its illustrations are extremely hard to make out what you’re supposed to do. This resulted with most of the components having poor fits especially the engine assembly. The top and bottom wing assembly was a nightmare as well. It took me many attempts to get them right because they keep coming apart when trying to lift them. I had to use painters tape remedy the situation. This however made putting the struts on both wings extremely difficult. This is also the case with engine mountings on the struts. Some components in which you have to paint are omitted for some reason or another. In conclusion, I give this kit a rating of 3 stars out of 5. Roden if you’re reading this, I highly recommend you do a better job with your illustrations and methods of assembly just like Airfix. It’s one of the worst kits I’ve worked on from you.