Heller Feuerwehr delahaye fire truck

[forthlin]

I'm thinking of getting one of these. Has anyone ever built one of these? Everything I've read about Heller models hasn't been very good so i don't want to waste my money on a junk model.

[maxwell48098]

Here is one that I did back in '90's and still have today.

 

A.J.

[maxwell48098]

I also took the ladder from the Delahaye kit and mounted it on a 1959 Mack B71 chassis to replicate an aerial ladder truck from the Chicago fire department.

 

A.J.

[Matt Bacon]

Heller 1/24 car and truck kits are far from junk. They aren’t easy builds, but they are accurate in shape and well-detailed. There are some quirks... the place where one part is glued to another is often marked with an engraved pattern, and the door interiors are often one piece clear plastic with the windows. The biggest “issues” are: first, detail and structural parts are very faithful in scale, so can be fragile and hard to handle; and secondly, because of the moulding technology of the time, you may need to build up frames out of several separate tubes for example instead of a single complex slide moulded part as Tamiya would do now.

Any Heller kit will be a challenge to build, but it’s just construction skills needed, not battling an ill-fitting, badly designed and incompetently-moulded kit into submission...

best,

M.

[forthlin]

Thanks for the input. I still have several other models I'm looking at before I choose, but this one is at the top of the list now.

[GeeBee]

4 hours ago, Matt Bacon said:

Heller 1/24 car and truck kits are far from junk. They aren’t easy builds, but they are accurate in shape and well-detailed. There are some quirks... the place where one part is glued to another is often marked with an engraved pattern, and the door interiors are often one piece clear plastic with the windows. The biggest “issues” are: first, detail and structural parts are very faithful in scale, so can be fragile and hard to handle; and secondly, because of the moulding technology of the time, you may need to build up frames out of several separate tubes for example instead of a single complex slide moulded part as Tamiya would do now.

Any Heller kit will be a challenge to build, but it’s just construction skills needed, not battling an ill-fitting, badly designed and incompetently-moulded kit into submission...

best,

M.

X2, I haven't built a Heller kit for many years, although I've got quite a few in the stash, never had a problem building them.

Edited February 5, 2021 by GeeBee

[stitchdup]

I've been slowly turning one into a hotrod hauler. I wouldn't believe what you've read about heller kits. Its just some reviewers cant get their head around heller kits having their own way of doing things. For the most part they are well detailed but you may find you cant paint the chassis until you have the engine installed but you have to paint the engine first, or the interior door panel usually being part of the glass. Their just different