World Kogei Kits

[Szdfan]

I’ve been finding these World Kogei locomotive kits on Hobby Search with some pretty eye watering prices (i.e. 86,000 yen). Can anyone tell me about them? Are they motorized? What’s the quality? Has anyone put one together? Are they worth it?

[cteno4]

There are a wide variety of world kogei kits from their sort of discount line that have plastic, etched brass and metal cast bits to very detailed kits and preassembled kits. Most all have power units (some things like the ants it’s not really realistic to power). The really high cost on some are because they are preassembled for you from a kit so it doubles the price for the labor.

 

I have several of economy kits and did all the fit assembly on one and was happy with how it went together. Mechs are simple but run well, but usual issues of small 2 axle mechs (I only have 2 axle models) on points and pulling power. They are interesting units they usually choose and fun to assemble. The steam kits I’m sure are much more of a challenge.

 

Do an AND search on world kogei and you will find a lot of stuff on various models.

 

jeff

[Martijn Meerts]

I have several of these kits in N, H0j and H0e scales.

 

They are a bit of a challenge to build considering you really want to solder them rather than glue them together. The parts generally do fit really well, but a good amount of skill / practice soldering brass is needed.

 

The locomotive kits are generally powered. They use a relatively simple motor, and I haven’t seen one with flywheels yet. I do have an EF53 that has 2 motors in it, 1 for each bogie. Couplers aren’t always included, especially with the H0j and H0e stuff, and they don’t come with head or tail lights. I’ve built a few N scale ones to the point where they can run, but no kit is completely finished yet. The first 2 kits I built were basically ruined due to lack of skill, but I’m currently building a C55 steam locomotive in N scale, which is going together quite well.

 

In H0j, I’ve mostly finished a small steam locomotive and a small freight car with crew cabin. Both are really waiting for paint before I can start adding some custom details to them.

 

The kits definitely need some good test fitting before soldering parts in place, the documentation also isn’t always clear as to which order parts should be added in. There are also regularly issues with missing parts or wrong parts, which makes sense since these are not mass produced and packaged by hand I believe. They have very good service though, they even made me a replacement part for a loco that hadn’t been in production for at least 5 years, and they didn’t have spare parts in stock anymore either.

 

Prices of the pre-built / pre-painted versions are actually very fair, it takes many hours building and painting the kits.