The Little World

It never fit in 1959, when the kit was released. It didn’t fit in 1989 when Revell bought the mould and re-issued it. It will not fit when someone east of the Urals finally gets the worn-out blocks and injects reindeer poo into them to claw back some rubles.

It’s not about fit. It’s about emotion, about tradition, about squeezing the last possible profit out of two blocks of 1950’s steel before they rust. Your duty is to buy the horrid thing and go away and be disappointed. You could have done that in Britain in 1959 and saved yourself all the wait until now…

And so the FROG hops another mile down the road. Or another verst, as it happens. The only saving grace is that it will probably not get worse; the Asians have better tool makers now and more money to invest. If they make a model of the kit they will do a fresh one and it will fit well. When the old UK mould is finally melted down for tank shells the next iteration of the kit will be fun to build.

Why do they do it? Why do the Russians produce shit kits from shit moulds? Because they can sell them for shit prices and claw back some of the western dollars they need to survive. They did the same in the 1970’s with camera designs and parts that they’d looted from the Germans in 1945. You could buy a copy of a 1939 Contax new for $ 75 AUD and have the fun of trying to make it work for longer than 6 months before the shutter mechanism failed.

Should we go along with the gag?

I have in the past, but I’m not so inclined in the future. There are better moulders and I can afford their prices sometimes. I have shown myself that I can cope with an ex-FROG Antonov or Ryan aircraft and make a creditable fist of it but I can do the same with an IBG, ICM, KP, or Special Hobby kit and end up with a far better result. They’re all eastern European makers so you can’t accuse me of bias.