Yesterday I made this Star Destroyer:
It’s a cardboard model kit, and only cost $20. The reviews were good and I was looking forward to seeing what it looked like assembled.
First impressions are excellent. A 30 page manual, 16 ‘runners’ with over 200 pieces printed on thick card that punched out easily. It even comes with glue that the manual says is only required if the connections were loose.
The print detail was excellent, and the pieces are clearly marked making assembly – at least initially – fairly easy. I could have done without punching out the hundreds of tiny slots though!
It’s a massive model, and very sturdy. Assembly up until the point in the above pic wasn’t too difficult, but after this things changed a lot. Putting the main hull pieces onto the superstructure was an exercise in frustration, since it was extremely difficult getting the tabs lined up.
The hinged pieces I think could have been better designed as well. Far too often the print separated from the backing revealing the cardboard as seen above. I probably could have fixed these easily with a bit of glue, but I didn’t care enough.
The spherical parts were almost impossible to correctly assemble. The design of these overall was dubious, and they were very loose even when I attempted to glue them. In the end I just left them as you see above.
The whole kit took me about 4 hours, and here’s the finished model:
At first glance it looks great, and as I said with a bit of extra work it could have been near perfect. I think this is a kit that shouldn’t be rushed (which I did), and would look very nice if every part was assembled with great care. That said it’s almost too big: where would one display this?!
I found it fit very nicely – after some rigorous disassembly – in the recycling bin 🙂
Overall I’ll give this a thumbs up despite the epilogue above, since I think the design is fundamentally strong and because I have another by the same company that I have high hopes for…
