My hobby store started carrying these. Anyone have any experience with them? I hear they are rekits of Tamiya and Trumpeter stuff, but I'm not sure about how good they are. They have LHA-2 for a nice price; I'm building the Tarawa at the moment and would like to keep on the series.

Stephen

Howdy Stephen, They are all put out by Trumpeter!
Several are from the Tamiya 1/350 molds. The Arizona is a Trumpeter kit, also found under the name of Banner. Same kit! Looks like trumpeter is our future, they are the only company willing to step up to the plate and put out new models that we want to build!

Cheers,

Garry

So in general how good are these kits? The Dragon 1:700 Tarawa was a fine model as far as I'm concerned. I wouldn't want to have to go much lower on quality or detail (I'm spoiled by Revell's 1:72 armor in that regard).

Stephen

Well, The Arizona is good! The Tamiya copies are ok, but they seem to be molded out of soft plastic. If you want a top notch model kit to build, I would spend the extra money for the Tamiya kits!

Just my 2 clams,

Garry

I'll have to give a few of these a try. The price is quite right. My LHS sells Tamiya for above retail. These seem to be priced exactly at retail, which I can handle for a model at a time on impulse buying.

Stephen

Avoid the Mini-hobbies LHA kit. They are bad motorized copies of the DML/Dragon version.

I have and am currently working on the Mini Hobby Models Bismarck. The plastic is pretty soft and I'd say its an average kit. I plan on building the Tamiya Bismarck so I'd be able to really compare the two.

I picked mine up for 20 bucks so I really can't complain about it

Sean

Thanks for the advice on the LHA kit. I was hoping that wasn't the case but had to believe it would be given my experience with the direct correlation between price and kit quality. I can get the Dragon kit online for basically the same price, so maybe I'll just have to stick with that.

I might take a chance with some of the very cheap ones, since I wouldn't be risking very much. I'm just getting to the point where I can't stand bad kits anymore.

S