Customer Reviews

U.S. S. Navy Nimitz Class CVN-68 1-500 by Trumpeter

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After reading Tom Clancy's "Red Storm Rising" for the umpteenth time, I was in the mood to build a Nimitz class aircraft carrier. I saw that Trumpeter made a large scale model of the ship and I excitedly purchased it. Unfortunately, I was very disappointed with the result.

Although Trumpeter has a good reputation in ship modeling, this particular model is not one of their best. The kit is designed to be motorized and is very toy-like as a result. My particular model was missing the hardware packet that contained the electric motor, wiring, screws, etc., so I was unable to install those parts.

Construction of the model is a bit difficult. It has many ejection pin marks, sink holes and ill-fitting parts. The three-piece flight deck refused to go together without gaps between the sections until I removed the location pins on the rear deck piece and just glued it. The tower is very basic and rather crude. The antennas are crude solid blocks of plastic instead of the wire frame one would expect. The aircraft are crudely molded with many sink marks and poor detail, especially considering the scale at 1:500.

All in all, this model is very much a "toy" and not a "scale model". The details are simplified to make this kit "playable" and it's not really worth the effort to fix all the mistakes and add the detail that is needed for a model this large. This was the first large ship model that I'd built in years and I was very disappointed with it.