How we judge and rank

Read what follows against the pages it produced — that is what it is for. A method nobody can check against its own output is a statement of intent and nothing more, so every rule below is written as what it REFUSES rather than as what it favors.

Why compatibility is read before the price

Compatibility is a footnote on most shelves. Here it is read first, before any price, because half of what is sold here physically cannot work with half of what the reader already owns. A 0,3 mm (0.01 in) nozzle will not seat in another maker’s body. A lacquer thinner curdles a water-based acrylic in the cup. A 1:48 decal sheet is a third too large on a 1:72 fuselage. A styrene cement does nothing at all to the ABS of a brick model, and a 32 mm (1.26 in) figure base will not clamp into a handle made for 20 to 25 mm (0.79 to 0.98 in).

So every page states the fit as a figure or a named system, taken from what the maker published: the scale as a ratio, the nozzle diameter in millimeters, the paint base and the thinner that belongs to it, the plastics a glue states, the base diameter a handle grips, the thread on an airbrush hose, the internal dimensions of a case. What fits what is decided by a dimension or a list a manufacturer wrote down — never by two objects that look as though they go together. Where no maker published any of it, the page records the fit as unpublished rather than inferring it from a photograph or a model name.

How a thing behaves on the model is what no listing prints

Nobody prints behavior, and it decides more than anything in the basket. A paint sold as ready to use is ready for a brush and not for a 0,2 mm (0.01 in) nozzle, and no bottle says which. A one-part filler shrinks overnight, and no tube prints how much. An enamel wash can be wiped back an hour later and an acrylic one cannot. A matt varnish over a fine metallic turns it back into grey paint. Press-fit plywood breaks when forced and cannot be reglued invisibly.

A page therefore reports the condition each figure was published against, and records the silence where a listing gives none. On several shelves here the condition is missing far more often than it is printed — the working time of an epoxy putty, the pressure a paint was formulated for, the bodies a spare nozzle fits — and a figure sold without its condition is being sold for every bench at once.

Every figure arrives with its publisher attached

Not a single figure here is printed without the name of whoever published it. Not in a footnote, and not implied by a logo on a box: beside the figure itself, in the same table row or the same sentence.

This is practical rather than high-minded. A figure that carries its source can be traced, disputed, or corrected by somebody who writes in; a figure without one leaves a reader with nothing to do except believe it. Where a manual and a marketplace listing disagree, the manual is what gets printed. Where neither says anything, the field stays empty and the page calls it empty — because a plausible substitute, set in the same type as everything around it, cannot be told apart from something somebody measured.

The fifth year, in four questions

• Which part gives out first, and whether it is sold separately. Nozzles, needles, O-rings, compressor filters, scalpel blades, palette paper, brush points, the putty in a handle: every family has one. The page names it and says whether a spare or a refill exists, because that single fact separates a tool with a service life from a tool with a component life.
• What is missing from the box. The paint and the glue a kit states it is sold without. The compressor an airbrush needs. The hose between them. The primer every paint needs under it. The bases a figure kit does not include. Anything that must be bought before the first part comes off the sprue was never the price on the label, and the page puts the difference back.
• What the bench has to supply. A window that opens, before a powered booth extracts anything. A free bench edge, for a clamp-on holder. A mains socket within reach of a compressor that has no battery. These are stated often enough to compare, and they rule a purchase out rather than ranking it.
• Whether it is on sale in your country at all. Every reference is confirmed market by market before publication, and every page names the stores where a price was found. An excellent kit that nobody stocks in your country is a frustration rather than a recommendation.

The order documents are read in when they contradict each other

For anything dimensional — scales as ratios, parts counts, finished lengths in centimeters, nozzle diameters in millimeters, pressures in bar, volumes in milliliters, grit numbers, base diameters, and what a spare states it fits — the manufacturer's own documentation is read first and the marketing headline last. The order reverses for whatever is set in the largest type on the box, for the plain reason that the largest type exists to sell.

Standards, declared categories and approval marks come second, and they are treated as claims awaiting re-confirmation rather than permanent properties. A maker revises a mold, a decal sheet or a supplied paint list without changing the box number, and a standard is revised on a schedule of its own.

Owners several seasons in come third, and on one question nothing replaces them. No specification sheet records whether a trigger still returns cleanly in its fourth year, whether a wet palette foam grew mold over a summer, whether a decal sheet printed twenty years ago still releases, or whether anyone answers the spares address. Where a judgment rests mainly on one of the three, the page says which. Where none of the three answers, the page says so rather than reasoning its way to a number.

Model figures are transcribed, never calculated

This trade sells on numbers, and a number is the one thing in a listing that gets copied along without anyone stopping on it. One rule therefore covers every page that prints one: every scale, parts count, finished length, nozzle diameter, working pressure, volume in milliliters, grit number, base diameter, age mark, pack weight and stated capacity on this site is copied from the manufacturer, in the unit it was published in, with its source named — and not one of them is recalculated, converted or inferred here. And where a maker published nothing at all, the page says exactly that, in words.

The kit shelf is where that rule earns its keep. Turning a 1:144 into a length in centimeters takes a moment, and the figure it produced would look entirely authoritative set in the same typeface as everything around it. It would also be our figure rather than the maker's — and it would be ambiguous, because a wingspan and an overall length are two different measurements and a box prints whichever flatters it. Nothing in the typography would tell a reader which of the two they were looking at.

A rank inside one shelf, and never a score

Nothing here carries a score. A single mark would have to weigh a 1:35 tank kit against a bag of 25 mm (0.98 in) bases, and there is no honest exchange rate between those two things. What a page gives instead is a position inside one family, with the sentence that earned it printed alongside.

Each shelf is ordered from its modest end upward, not from its expensive end down. Nearly everybody arrives with the budget already decided and one gap to fill, and a page that opens on the dearest thing there answers a question nobody asked.

One pull is particular to this subject, and naming it works better than quietly resisting it. A kit is sold on the model the buyer has not yet built. Build a page around that and it recommends the largest scale, the highest parts count and the finest nozzle in every family, because more can always be argued for. A 1:32 kit of eight hundred parts is the one that stays half-built in its box; a 0,2 mm (0.01 in) nozzle blocks on the paint a 0,3 mm (0.01 in) sprays all afternoon. Where the honest answer is that the more serious item would make the day worse, that is the answer the page gives.

One bias cannot be structured away. This site covers what can be bought through the Amazon stores of the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy and Spain. Kits sold only through model shops and club stands are under-represented here as a result, and wherever that shapes a conclusion the page says so.

Two sentences that never appear here, and where the instruction sheet takes over

Neither limit moves, and both are better stated outright than left for a reader to infer. Nothing here — no glue, no thinner, no primer, no aerosol, no spray booth — is described as making anything safe. A page reports what the maker specifies for its own product: the age mark, the pictograms on the label, the extraction rate stated, the base and the diluent named, the ventilation the carton asks for. The rest belongs to those instructions and to the label itself, because whether a session is safe depends on the room, the window, the hours spent and who else is in the house — and no listing knows any of that.

And no page here says which kit your bench needs. A scale, a parts count and a level are properties of a product measured against an assumed modeller. What a particular person requires depends on the hours they have, the light over the table, the steadiness of their hands and the shelf they are building for — none of that is printed on any carton, none of it is ours to state, and it is the one recommendation this site is structurally unable to make honestly.

None of this replaces the manufacturer's instructions, and two things belong elsewhere rather than to a web page: the hazard label on a glue, a thinner or an aerosol, which is set by regulation and is the only document that says how that product may be used, and the disposal of what is left in a jar of cleaner, which is decided where you live. For those, and for the maintenance a bench demands, the page points at the documents and the people rather than rewording them — even though a page that stops there earns nothing.