Lindberg Stagecoach

As I'm getting fairly far along in construction of the Lindberg Concord Stagecoach, I thought I'd post a few thoughts about it.

The most obvious thought is that it's big and eats up a lot of parts. I decided to break it into subassemblies which will be assembled, finished and weathered separately. They are:

1. The chassis and wheels, which are dark yellow with dark metal hardware
2. The body, which is a dark barn red with various detail colors
3. The horses
4. The figures
5. The luggage, including what came in the kit and what I'm scratchbuilding
6. The harnesses themselves (is that a britchen or are you just happy to see me?)

The kit is an odd mix of things. Most of the parts sport pretty good detail, but most of the parts also sport heavy pin marks and fairly impressive sink marks. Not so much flash, but plenty of sink. You'll spend some time filling and sanding all of this, but once that work is done and the parts have a coat of paint on them, they look pretty nice - I was especially pleased with the square nut/round washer detail.

The figures are also a mixed bunch. The kit comes with six figures, which are cast solid in a grade of fairly brittle styrene. They remind me more of resin figures than plastic figures, which are typically hollow multi-part contraptions. The figures include a driver, a shotgun rider, three passengers (a gussied-up man and woman from town, and someone who appears to be an Army officer) and an outlaw. In its first incarnation the stagecoach was clearly being ambushed by the outlaw, considering that the driver is hauling back on the traces and the horses are in full panic-stop mode. But I guess that didn't pass the sensitivity test, because now there's no mention of the outlaw and the box art shows the drivers offering a friendly greeting to someone I assume is a hitchhiking cowboy. The passengers don't bother me, and maybe I'll make something out of the outlaw. But I really don't care for the driver and shotgunner. The driver looks like Gabby Hayes and the shotgunner looks like he'd be more comfortable with a pool cue than that Winchester rifle. I see these guys as hard-looking men in worn dusters, so there's going to have to be surgery.

The horses are also something of a disappointment. They have too many teeth in their mouths, and I never could get them to fit seamlessly - I just laid on tons of liquid cement, mashed them together with clamps, and figured I'd fix the booboos later. And booboos there are, gaps on the one hand and heavy, heavy parting lines on the other. They're going to require hot knife work on the manes, tails, ears, fetlocks and elsewhere to eradicate the mushy plastic look, but at least their proportions look right (at least to me). They have no under-hoof detail at all, and I'm not sure I feel like carving in all that detail and making all those horseshoes...

The only part of the kit I haven't dabbled with yet are the harnesses. They look complete, but just like harnessing up a real horse, harnessing up the 1/16th scale horses is liable to be a chore. I don't think I like the fairly thick vinyl ribbon Lindberg supplied for the traces and whatnot; I think I'll replace all that with either paper or doubled electrical tape and either make new buckles or salvage the old ones.

On the whole, it's a good kit. It's unique, so we cut it some slack, and the actual chassis and body aren't bad at all. Clutter them up with luggage and cargo and I think they'll do just fine. The horses and figures aren't great, but can probably be salvaged. The harnesses look good in principle. The only real engineering problems with the kit are the sink marks and pin marks, which require a good deal of eradication.

The instructions are long and contain a mixture of diagrams and written instructions. They aren't bad. They're a little busy, and the diagrams could have been larger and more numerous, but at no point did the instructions completely buffalo me. Sometimes it took some dry-fitting and head-scratching to figure out just exactly what the instructions were saying, but not to excess.

The decals aren't bad as far as they go, which isn't far enough. They consist of gold scrollwork for the body panels, and one US Mail sign. What, no Wells-Fargo Overland markings?? You're on your own to represent the stagecoach's commercial affiliation.