Good Hobby Boss kits

[Master Zen]

Aside from their excellent MiG-3, are there any other WW2 Hobby Boss kits worth the money? I'm particularly keen on knowing if their other French and Soviet fighters are any good

[Seahawk]

Aside from their excellent MiG-3, are there any other WW2 Hobby Boss kits worth the money? I'm particularly keen on knowing if their other French and Soviet fighters are any good

Assume we're talking 1/72. I reckon the F4U-4 Corsair is excellent. Excellent surface detail and some of the less detailed areas don't show eg undercarriage largely hidden by the doors. Main flaws are that it's not sure whether it's a F4U-4 (MGs) or an F4U-4B (cannons) and that it has rockets attached to bomb pylons vice rocket stubs, in fact all the stores are crude and toy-like. But once I'd tarted mine up with spare Tamiya HVARs, tanks and pylons, an IPMS-USA instrument panel transfer, some seatbelts and some Superscale transfers, I reckoned it didn't look out of place alongside the genuine Tamiya example. In fact people have not always guessed correctly which is which. So excellent value for the £3.99 I paid for it when it first came out. Not to mention that it inspired me to build it in more like a week than my usual 3 years.

Inspired by this I looked at most of the other early releases (eg Spitfire, Hurricane, P-40, Wildcat, Hellcat) at the Nats. Unfortunately they all seemed to have either some outline flaw, sometime quite major, or crude toy-like detail to put me off. Have been quite tempted by some of the more recent releases (He 162, MS406, D520) but am not instinctively familiar enough with the airframes to know whether they are accurate or not.

HTH.

Nick

Edited May 7, 2010 by Seahawk

[Greenshirt]

I enjoy building them, as they look reasonable at arm's length. If you google the specific kit/aircraft you're interested in you'll probably find some guidelines how to correct any flaws. I've found most corrections needed to make it absolutely accurate (other than the MiG-3 and the F4U) push me towards the higher cost and more accurate kits of the same aircraft by other manufacturers.

Tim

[Byron Boyd]

Aside from their excellent MiG-3, are there any other WW2 Hobby Boss kits worth the money? I'm particularly keen on knowing if their other French and Soviet fighters are any good

I've heard nice things said about their MiG-15s, and Quickboost obviously thought they had enough merit to issue a couple of aftermarket sets to gussy them up.

From what I've seen and heard, the decal sheets are very nice, and almost worth the price of the kit alone.

I used the landing gear struts from their P-47 to replace the puny, way-too-short struts on my RoG P-47M - it saved me from K-balling a perfectly good Tamiya kit!

Byron

[John Thompson]

Aside from their excellent MiG-3, are there any other WW2 Hobby Boss kits worth the money? I'm particularly keen on knowing if their other French and Soviet fighters are any good

Can't answer for the French kits, but the other two Russian types besides the MiG-3 are the Yak-3 and the La-7. The Yak-3 is so-so and needs quite a lot of work to clean up some of the inaccuracies, but it's doable, with good references. You might just as well start with the Hasegawa or Heller kits, though, unless you enjoy making corrections. The La-7 is just plain bad, and should be avoided!

John

[Ed Russell]

All of their early stuff is 'derivative' ie stolen!

P-51B/C Mustang early - quite good, not sure what they have copied here ?Revell

Hurricane - laughable, about 1/144 scale in width (okay, I'm taking poetic licence a bit) - copy of Academy with increased errors

P-51D Mustang - nearly as bad as the Hurricane - Academy copy?

MS 406 - quite good, they copied a Hasegawa kit and fixed up the few errors

La-7 - I haven’t seen it but apparently it’s a copy of the Eduard kit and should be excellent

P-40 - copy of Academy kit, not bad at all

D.520 - Haven't seen kit but if box art is anything to go by - canopy is about 1/60 scale

and, as you say, the MiG-3 is best available, very nice kit (maybe they did original research)

[John Thompson]

La-7 - I haven’t seen it but apparently it’s a copy of the Eduard kit and should be excellent

I have seen it, and tried to build it, and if it's a copy of the Eduard kit as you say, it's an extremely poor one. As I said before, this one should be avoided.

The most likely reason for the quality of the MiG-3 kit is that Hobby Boss is part of Trumpeter; the original research you suggest is the same research that produced the Trumpeter 1/32 and 1/48 MiG-3 kits.

John

[Steve N]

The Hobby Boss P-40B/C is quite nice, except for a non-existent cockpit and missing landing gear doors. I actually like it better than the Trumpeter kit, as the Hobby Boss surface detail is much more subtle. Now Hobby Boss's later P-40s are another story..all are simplified knock-offs of the Academy kits, with the same dimensional errors. Specifically, much-too-tall canopies and too-bulged prop spinners.

The Hobby Boss AT-6 is also a simplified knock-off of the excellent Academy kit, which is more detailed and can be found for about the same price.

SN

[MilneBay]

I have only built one - the 1/72 P47D bubbletop. An easy build apart from the wing/fuselage join but overall too simplified.

I won't be doing any others.

[Julien]

The spit makes up OK, comes without main gear doors for some reason which are easy to make.

Also go with the open canopy as the closed one does not fit at ALL

I love there kits. If you want to go later then the F-86F-30 & F-86F-40 kits are really nice, word of warning though mahor tailsitters you need to bung at least 10g in the front.

Julien

[The wooksta V2.0]

The Fw 190D-9 is a beauty which I really enjoyed. The He 162 is nice too, although it could do with a new canopy and the u/c legs need shortening. The F4U Corsair I also enjoyed but it got hacked about a bit - new Bristol Centaurus engine and a cut down spine with bubble hood.

They're cracking little kits which look the part and ideal for using up decals at a low price.

[Nick Millman]

The A6M5c Zero, although not so easy to find, is OK, arguably better than the Academy kit, a quick build and good for trying out paint colours and techniques. With a few detail corrections it can stand comparison to the more expensive Hasegawa version.

The Japanese Model Art magazine of November 2008 did a build feature showing what needs to be done to correct the kit and comparing it with the Hasegawa A6M5. It stood up well.

[Seahawk]

They're cracking little kits which look the part and ideal for using up decals at a low price.

And, with relative few parts, a brilliant antidote to Advanced Modeller Syndrome.

Nick

[davidelvy]

I've built the Dewoitine D520 and ejoyed it very much. I did not look into the accuracy as I am not a big fan of French aircraft, but it went together fine and the decals were good. There is precious little in cockpit, though.