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[quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by dthurman I had their catalog (Suydam) back when I was like 10 years old. I spent weeks looking and drooling over those buildings, in my mind I had the ultimate layout with all their buildings. I never owned one. Are they as sharp looking in the catalog as they are once built? Were they tough kits to put together? [/quote] I may ruffle some feathers here but this stuff was state of the art 1960. I built a couple of the metal kits years ago. I soldered them together. I looked at them in the 90s' when I got back into the hobby and they are grossly out of scale with pretty crude details. The corrugated metal scale out to have 6" wide corrugations. Compare to the Campbell's corruagated metal and you will see the difference. I would be wary of older kits with lots of cardboard. I usually replace the cardboard with styrene because unless the cardboard is carefully braced, it will warp on you. Especially if you paint it or say glue shingles on it. Nothing more frustrating than to shingle a roof with the campbell's shingles only to have it warp. How difficult to assemble? Pretty hard to get the solder joints to line up and look right. IMHO now there are so many kits out there with far superior details that will take you same amount of time or less to assemble why bother with these? As many of you know, just because it is hard to put together or takes great skills to pull it off doesn't mean that you will end up with a highly detailed, great looking model. Some guys are throwing around the term "craftsman kit" a lot these days. Does this mean highly detailed and a lot of work or simply high level modeling skills are needed? My definition is higher level of skill to assemble the kit to reach a higher level of detail in the assembled model. There are a lot of older kits where a high level of skill is needed to assemble them but they don't reach a high level of detail....Are these craftsman kits?? Kits that do fit my definition of craftsman are AMB, Banta, Builders in Scale, Heritage Models, some Campbells, FSM, Yorke, Cibolo Crossing, Magnusson, Crystal River, Rio Grande Models etc. With the newer stuff you will have a model with better detail with the same amount of effort. I still have one of my old Suydam kits for nostalgias sake.....The rest I cut up the metal for gon loads and to put in my junk yard looks great...
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