No, I haven’t gone over to the dark side, but I spent the evening building a resin kit. (Gasp)
I recently took on a project building a railroad for a gentleman out East. This came about after our demo layout received several offers of purchase wile we were in Springfield.
Well, rather than part with my just finished railroad, I said “I don’t want to sell it, but I’ll make you one”.
As part of the deal I also offered to build several kits that my client had purchased. Business is business and I brought home a Chooch “Columbia Depot”. Now we make a very similar depot that’s base on an RS&SL prototype. The best research I can find, puts the Chooch kit at just under $70. Our branch line depot sells for $6.
So how does the resin kit stack up? Well, it certainly has a lot of dimension, and a few air bubbles. They obviously designed it to take advantage of resins strength. The stone foundation and platform are nice, except for the bubbles. I want to be fair and impartiality is difficult, possibly impossible, but I have to say the fit is rather rough. The window castings are nice but some kind of template for the glazing (supplied plastic) would be nice. The tin roof, I’m not sold on and I might replace it with our rusty sheet metal.
There are 5 basic resin castings. All needed cleanup. and then there’s the bundle of sticks. Yes sticks. Lots of sticks that I have to cut into rafter tails, fascia boards, posts and rafters. There’s a small bag of white metal castings. (more clean up) All in all this puppy is going to take 3 or 4 days to build. I’m happy with the result so far, though all I’ve done is paint and assemble the resin castings. I’m not looking forward to the sticks, but it should look fine if I can keep the texture from getting fuzzy. If I can make an overall comparison, it’s that resin is the exact opposite from paper. Resin is a lot of dimension with no effort (or skill) but the painting is challenging. Paper of course puts the challenge in the building with almost no finishing.
I won’t be converting anytime soon. Paper beats rock.
Thom