One name on every page, and one invoice to disclose

ScaleVerdict covers what is built piece by piece and everything that is used up finishing it: aircraft, armor, ship, car, mecha, wooden and metal kits and book nook kits; airbrushes, compressors, starter sets and spray booths; nozzles, holders, cleaners and thinners; acrylic and metallic paints, paint sets, primers, varnishes, spray paints, chrome markers, weathering sets and brushes; wet palettes, painting handles and painting stands; sprue cutters, hobby knives, tweezers, abrasives, pin vices, clamps and masking tape; plastic cement, superglue, filler and epoxy putty; decals and photo-etch tools; model grass, trees and LEDs; display cases and miniature bases. That is 1 categories across five language editions. It is a small independent editorial project, not a shop, not a manufacturer and not a model retailer.

The subject is what somebody buys to build and finish a model of their own. Several neighboring subjects belong to sister sites: resin and filament printers, which the maker site already serves; rotary tools and bench vices, which belong to the workshop ones. Model railways stop at the rail — the grass, the trees and the bases are here, the track and the locomotives are not. Bricks that come apart again are not compared here, and neither are finished die-cast collectables, which are nothing to build. Left out entirely: any instruction on how a classified product may be used — a glue, a thinner, an aerosol — which is set by its own label and by regulation, not by a web page. What remains is a hobby chosen on the figures a manufacturer puts in writing.

Everything else on this site follows from a single distinction, which is why it is printed in the body of this page rather than in small type at the bottom. A published figure is a fact about the product, and never a fact about the modeller. A 1:72 scale is a stated ratio to an original, not a finished length; a 310-part count is a property of a mold, not a measure of difficulty. It matters because the gap is not a rounding error: a 0,2 mm (0.01 in) nozzle blocks on the same paint a 0,3 mm (0.01 in) sprays all afternoon, and a 1:48 decal sheet is a third too large on a 1:72 fuselage. The same discipline governs a compressor pressure quoted without the pressure anyone paints at, and an age mark printed as though it were a skill grade.

A number reaches these pages one way only, and there is no second way in: lifted from the manufacturer or from the body that published the standard, credited everywhere it appears, and left in the unit that source picked. Three things follow from that. A finished length is reproduced as declared, and where a box gives a wingspan and an overall length the page prints both rather than choosing. A parts count is reported as a count. An age mark is reported as a toy-safety mention and never turned into a skill level, because the skill belongs to the person at the bench. And nothing here — no glue, no thinner, no aerosol — is described as making anything safe: we report what the maker publishes, and hand the rest to the maker's own instructions, to the hazard label on the carton and to the room it is used in.

How ScaleVerdict is paid for

Every "Check price" button on the site is an affiliate link to Amazon, and a purchase made after clicking one earns us a commission. The kit, the compressor or the bag of bases costs you the same either way.

Disclosing an incentive means little unless the direction it pulls in is disclosed with it. Amazon pays a percentage of the sale, so a single compressor earns many times what a pot of paint does. Three things stop that arithmetic from reaching the pages:

• No product has ever moved up a shelf here because it pays more. The rate is never looked up while a shelf is being ordered, and no shelf opens at its expensive end. Where the cheapest thing on it is the right answer — and for a first year it usually is — that is where the page starts.
• Price and effect are unrelated quantities, and this site keeps them apart. Several of the firmest recommendations on it are among its cheapest items: a four-euro pack of spare scalpel blades, a single-blade nipper that leaves no nub to sand, a bag of a hundred micro tips that turns any glue bottle into a precision applicator. A gloss coat laid under a decal does more for a finished model than most of what is sold to improve it.
• No part of this site has ever been purchasable by a manufacturer. Not a rank, not a mention, not a gentler adjective — and no fee, no unasked-for sample, no arrangement of any kind has ever been accepted. If that ever changed, the page in question would carry the fact in its own body, where whoever reads that page would meet it.

The line these pages do not cross

No page carries sponsorship. No shelf is a "top ten" stitched together from other people's reviews. And no order on this site answers to a commission rate, a click-through figure, or whatever a warehouse happens to be holding this month.

Neither is anything recommended on the strength of a specification sheet alone. A big figure writes persuasive copy and poor advice: a page built around the largest number on a carton names the dearest item on the shelf every single time. Every verdict therefore shows its working — what the maker published, what a named standard defines where one is cited, what owners report after a year or two — and when a judgment rests mainly on one of those three, the page says which one.

And there is one recommendation this site will never make, because published figures cannot support it: which kit your bench needs. A scale, a parts count and a level are properties of a product measured against an assumed modeller; what a particular person requires depends on the hours they have, the light over the table and the shelf they are building for, and none of that is printed on any carton. Pages here report what a maker publishes, and say plainly where the published figure stops being enough.

When something here is wrong

Prices move, references are withdrawn, standards are revised, and a maker will change a mold, a decal sheet or the paint list in the box without touching the number printed on it. Write and say so: it is corrected, and the correction is recorded. Every page carries the date it was last reviewed.