Sunday, January 4, 2026

A long underwhelming project...finally complete.

Many moons ago I started collecting bits of a Renedra 'castle'.  Castle is less accurate, as they never finished a bunch of other components (you can tell from the instructions and boxes that they had plans for more than "two" pieces).  It makes more of a city wall than a castle, though you can put them together to make a small castle if desired.

I finally acquired enough to tackle it.  I took three of the four towers and removed the third story (it makes them unwieldy and unnecessarily large in my opinion).  I made one of the towers into a gatehouse and used the last tower as a simple keep.

The kits are mediocre - the destroyed wall section (not pictured) is so bad, I may not fix it and bother adding it to the collection.

For Renedra, a popular plastics company - the quality is shockingly poor.  Loads of flash, and the walls are so thin in places that there are holes you need to patch with sprue-goo or something similar.  Many of the edges are thin and need reinforcing as they're likely to snap if hit, etc.

All of the components require immense cleaning, tons of flash, some erupted gates that spilled onto the sprues, and even some blown out sections of the molds where "drops" of plastic are present and need removing.  The arrow slits are mostly in need of cleaning.

The kits are not very modular --- and they could have been.  A little work and you could have really built all kinds of stuff out of them.  I have a bunch of spare walls from the removed tower floors that I'll use to build another building or something.

As a set of kits, I'd rate it ...6/10 at best.  However, there are only two big plastic castles on the market and I think the texture of these is superior to the Tabletop Workshop kits --- though those have more variety and seem better designed.
 

5 comments:

  1. Shame to hear there are problems with the kit; the Renedra kits I have are all pretty decent (no castle pieces though).

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  2. Hopefully your review saves someone else disappointment! Your hard work paid off, though. It looks great now!

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    1. It's nothing a normal modeler can't cope with, just...be ready to be underwhelmed, really. The kits function (obviously), but if you're used to modern, clean plastic kits, it's definitely surprising.

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  3. I suspect they torpedoed further development given the ubiquity of 3d printing and castle stls. Whether that was explicit or as a result of poor sales who knows.

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  4. Ouch sounds pretty bad. Well, they do clean up nice at least!

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