Worst. Kit. Ever.

Nowadays modellers really are spoiled by the choice and quality of the kits available to them. Professional resin casting is reaching ever-higher standards and when done right even DIY casting can produce high-quality results. Here however I present an interesting example from the other end of the scale...

My eBay saved search for bus kits mostly seems to return either ancient whitemetal kits that sellers believe to automatically be valuable because of their age or fairly recent resins going for utterly ridiculous amounts that far exceed their new prices, but something interesting suddenly popped up one day - not only was I not aware of the model's existence, it was made by a manufacturer I had never heard of either. A surprising lack of interest allowed me to secure it for the starting bid, so here it is for your delectation.

Don't be fooled by the attractive packaging - this is definitely the model's best feature!

What is it?
An oddity, for sure. It is a resin kit of a French Berliet Cruisair coach, made to British-outline 1/76 scale (note not 1/72 as might be expected) by a Ukrainian firm called Unicraft. The only Google results for this related to the very eBay item I had just bought, but I ultimately found my way to Unicraft's own website. There I discovered the firm's main product range is 1/72 resin kits of warplanes, but no mention was made of any road vehicles. Contacting the seller revealed he had bought it a few years ago from a French eBay seller but had also never seen another and didn't know much about it.

What is it like?
There are a few reviews of Unicraft plane kits online but these give varying impressions, some suggesting they are of good quality and easy to build, while at least one reviewer actually gave up and binned his, declaring it unbuildable and the worst kit he had ever encountered, so I really didn't know what to expect. The kit comes in a high-quality box printed in full colour on glossy card with a rather attractive artist's impression of the coach. Sadly the quality of the model itself doesn't even come close to that of the box!

Half-eaten Caramac or model kit?

Upon opening said box I was confronted by what I can only describe as various lumps of half-eaten Caramac bars, some of which looked vaguely bus shaped. The parts are obviously hand-cast but to the poorest standard I have ever seen. I'm used to having to clean small amounts of flash from castings, but these have massive blocks of excess material, often thicker than the parts themselves, that will need to be carefully sawn off. The cast-in detail is poor and the model suffers badly from air holes and surface pitting. Some of the bits, such as those on the right in the above photo, are so misshapen that I'm sure they are actually just lumps of scrap resin and nothing to do with the kit, though why the box is full of these is beyond me.

All this may have been forgivable if some decent instructions had at least been provided so the builder could stand a decent chance of assembling it correctly. Sadly, there are no specific instructions for this model whatsoever, just a sheet of photos of the real coach and some general tips in French for working with resin, so you're on your own!

What's going to happen to it?
A good question! I bought the kit fully intending to build it, but that would certainly be a huge challenge and take many hours of careful work to achieve a half-decent result. Given that I already have a large number of easier kits in my unbuilt stash, in all honesty this one is likely to keep getting put aside. Whether it ultimately gets built or not, it's still a fascinating and unique piece to have in my collection and certainly provokes some interesting comments when shown to other modellers!

Sows' ears and silk purses come to mind.

So there you go, the worst model kit I have ever seen and I imagine it'll take something pretty special to beat it. Has anyone encountered worse? I'd be interested to hear your bad kit experiences.