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Cracking the Box: MiniArt Norman Street

Very dissapointed after watching the video. Those bumps are way too much. There have always been bumps in their kits, I bought 6 of them to date and liked them a lot, but in this case it seems to be littered with them. A lot of sanding and possibly damaging is needed to make it look good. A real pity but this is a pass for me

Miniart won't get my business again with those bumps. What on earth have they been thinking. Miniart think about what is important to your customer !!

Oh, boo-hoo - a kit manufacturer makes something that takes a bit of cleaning up and work to get right. Ain't the first time a kit comes out of the box needing some care and attention before assembly - why the snarking about this one..? Are we not modellers? We should be able to take care of a few nodules here and there - if we can handle punch-out marks on styrene kits then this is no hardship. Honestly, anybody'd think this hobby is just about shaking a bottle of glue into the box and pouring out a prize-winning diorama...

Howdy Y'all I think I would start by buying one of the less expensive kits first. The bumps have me worried too. The kits seem to cost a pretty penny and I would look for a resin kit first. Just my 2 cents. Have a good day, Don "Lakota"

ACAV the complaint is that it is smothered in the spikes that would take an age to remove and will likely still show to some extent. Please take a close look at all those spikes on textured surfaces and tell me it is not excessive.

I am not liking those bumps/pimples. If this is the new standard from Miniart for their diorama bases then count me out. I've built several of their bases and they were nice because they were easy to assemble and didn't require much clean up other than the join seams. Having to remove all this bumps/pimples just doesn't make the building process fun. Call me lazy or whatever you want but I've been building models long enough and I've come to the point where I don't want any extra hassles during my building. This is a hobby after all. I get enough headaches and hassles in my job....I don't need it in my recreational activity.

I have used a number of their dio bases already and find them very good. In the unpainted state the ejector bumps seem unduely large und plentyful, but I never had any real problems with them. I didn't even remove most of them. When painted the do blend in nicely, IMHO. Given the money value, I think there is no comparebale product on the market and they are fun to build. ... just my two cents! Cheers, Guido

Those pimples look excessive, and will take extra time sanding & most likely filling... I've just started their country diorama and there are at most 3-5 on the whole kit... And even those where a pain to get rid of, because the plastic is quite thin, once removed you are left will a nicel hole, which you have then gotta cover from behind and then fill/sand... They will get extremely harder if they are on the detailed parts like the street in this review... As mentioned they need to reevaluate the process or they may lose business....

Looks like they are getting bigger and more of them. At occassion when I have cut them away the plastic is so thin that a hole will be present instead. First time it was hard to fill that hole as I already glued the sides together. Next time I used tape as backing för filling them with putty. However, the idea with a ready made building or diorama base is that it should be quick and easy. All the cutting and filling takes that away. Cheers

These little bumps are a result of the vac-form manufacturing process for the face sheets. Vac-form aircraft kit builders of old will remember them. To get the maximum amount of detail these sheets are vac-formed into a female mould. Each of these bumps represents a vent hole drilled into the surface of the mould to allow the air to be sucked out of the mould so the plastic can get into the mould cavity. The more textured the surface is the more of these vent holes are needed and the more bumps you end up with. Yes, they are a little dedious to remove and fill, but they really are no big deal. If you want resin parts or injection moulded parts to eliminate these bumps, the kit wold be significantly more expensive or there would be significantly fewer of them, given the small production runs inherant with this sort of product. In addition to removing the bumps prior to closing up the fase sheets, you probably also need to reinforce the corners of the parts which can also becoem quite thin because of the stretching of the plastic due to the vac-form process. Again, not a "problem" but a byproduct of the process chosen to keep costs low. Take a look at some instructions on how to build vac-form kits and these will all be water under the bridge in short order. Paul