Reviews : Tamiya British Nelson Battleship Boat

A kit of a unique ship that I had issues with. Painting is difficult due to small details on the deck of the ship. Antenna are difficult to attach, and can be easily snapped off if you're not careful. Some holes need to be drilled out on the deck. The rear turret is lower than the middle turret, which causes the middle turret to block the rear guns at a certain elevation when facing directly forward, so take that into consideration before choosing the gun position and gluing. Auxiliary Boats / Lifeboats are placed loosely behind the bridge tower, or on the deck. Some lifeboats are attached on outward-facing davits, which are fragile. Some holes remain on the edge of the ship deck where additional lifeboats would be attached, but were not included in the kit. Overall, this kit seemed poorly designed for being a Tamiya model kit.

This kit goes together well BUT the biggest hassle of this kit is the very tiny size of the parts. This will be very apparent when you try to get the pieces off the grid especially those heart stopping moments when the piece fly's off the grid when you cut it. Then spend half an hour trying to find it or just as bad when cutting the mast free the mast snaps. These are the challenges of this kit. the other annoyance are the main gun turrets you have 3 choices glue the turret in place or melt the bottom tab to form a rivet head a method I never have been good at, or leave the turret loose and hope noone bumps the kit sending the turrets flying.

The Tamiya Nelson and Rodney were for their time a good quality model, having detail not found in the early days of 1/700th styrene imports, and were simple to build. Indeed, one great quality was the fact that they were also cheap, often around $10 or such and provided material for kitbashing. Example: if you do a G3, Mike Bartel often advocated using spares from the Rodney, such as the masts. Of course this kit is showing its age but if you want a reasonably priced kit, Tamiya's Rodney/Nelson still give you quality. You can if you desire go the 3D route and add quality without too much a bite in the wallet.

For the price of this ship I would say that it has great detail and would recommend it to any beginner modeler. I have been reading these other reviews and thought that any experienced ship modeler should recognize that the detail on this ship is not that impressive. The details are not sharp at all and the deck is really simplistic.They are really quite disappointing if you compare them to newer kits of any modeling company. I would definitely recommend this for any inexperienced modeler looking to practice their skills or someone who just wants an easy Nelson kit to build.

This is a quality model kit, but not for a beginner. The detail of the ship is beautiful. Instructions easy to follow, but you will need to have some patience with parts of this, since some are very small, and time needed for some parts to dry before going forward. It is a bit of a challenge but with some small tipped hand tools to help you, it moves along quite nicely. I only wish I had gotten the full hull version, as I'm not really a waterline kind of modeler. None the less, I enjoyed building this model, so will you.

great not that hard couple of challenging part. challenging for beginners easy for experts. great model kit.

fun kit to make for your BB collection. 5 star if it was faster on shipping part. its pretty slow.

Very detailed model ship. Okay shipment. Price is affordable.