‘Unbuildable’ Kits, Varying Skill Levels and Mobilising Your Mates

A number of years ago a kit for a steam locomotive was released in O scale that was purchased by many modellers working in 7mm (1:43.5) scale. While I’d seen a number of completed locomotives built from this kit painted and running, you could count such examples on one hand and, after talking to a few people who had made a start building the kit, the general consensus seemed to be that it was “a bit of a challenge” to build. It wasn’t so poorly designed that it couldn’t be built, but it was most definitely not a ‘beginner’s’ kit, being more fairly described as suitable for an experienced builder.

Just because a kit has all the parts required to produce a particular class of locomotive doesn’t guarantee it’s easy to assemble into a working model. As I have an unbuilt example of this kit, I was interested in gathering any hints and tips for a project that was on the ‘to do’ list for me (hopefully in the not too distant future). What I was hearing wasn’t terribly encouraging.

The dynamic between kits and the modellers building them is fairly complicated and placing the blame for a kit project grinding to a halt solely on kit manufacturers’ heads fails to take into account the level of skill required to build