HMS York
Samek 1/700 - resin
The quality of the casting in this kit is superb: I found absolutely no air bubbles; the moulding is as sharp as a razor; the breakwater, gun shields, and cradles for the ship's boats are paper thin (literally); and the deck is delicately scribed to simulate planking. I put the quality of the casting on par with Waveline and Hi-mould of Japan, who in my mind set the industry standard.
Dimensions-wise, the kit appears to be slightly undersize. She is about 1/8" shorter than the Matchbox Exeter kit, and ¼" shorter than the 1/700 scale drawing of York in the Profile Morskie publication. Based on my own measurements, she is probably closer to 1/8" undersize. By contrast, she appears slightly too beamy by perhaps 1/64". Nonetheless, the master-maker has really captured the character of the ship, with its straked stacks and awkward, stubby little bridge. The kit represents York in her wartime fit (1940-41), with her complex trapezoidal light/dark grey wartime camouflage pattern.
The hull, deckhouses, and catapult turntable are moulded integral to the hull, which greatly simplifies assembly. The only other major components that require assembly are the guns, bridge, and stacks. These other components are moulded on paper thin resin wafers (which are easily removed), or heavier casting blocks (here removal is slightly more difficult, but anyone with any experience with resin kits should have no problem).
The funnel caps are cast solid onto the stacks and most modellers will probably want to route them out and to add caps fashioned from brass wire. The piping on the funnel is perhaps a little too fine, and probably should have been heavier, but this is a minor criticism. Other minor criticisms: the hawser pipe holes are nicely rendered, but they lack their characteristic rims, which can be simulated by a link cut from one of the larger model railroad chains. Likewise, the ports for the 8" guns in the main turrets are represented by lightly scribed ovals. These should be drilled out to show some "depth." This was easily accomplished. In addition, because some of the mouldings are so finely rendered, you must be very careful handling the kit. As a result, the paper thin armour shielding for the 4" guns (which are located amidships) broke off during shipping, but this should be easy for a modeller with some experience with resin to fix. The PE set is a little basic by today's standards, lacking any kind of elaborate detail or relief etching, and most modellers will want to replace the catapult with one from White Ensign Models (though I think that York's catapult may have been a one-off design, and I'm not sure which catapult one would use to correctly represent it). Likewise, the davits should have semicircular goose necks, and should not be angled at the top, as rendered on the PE sheet. This is easily remedied by replacing the PE davits with fine brass wire. Finally, some of the ships boats are a bit "toy-like," and should be replaced by WEM boats, as should the four 4" HA guns.
The only major criticism concerns the bridge, which is incorrectly rendered. The shape of the lower bridge wings are wrong. They should be nearly identical in configuration to the middle bridge wings, but are not. The source of this error is unclear, since the drawings in Raven and Roberts (British Cruisers of the Second World War), and Profile Morskie No. 3 (HMS York) show them as being identical in outline. Moreover, the upper bridge has several additional errors. The bridge face is simplified (compare to the nice photo of the bridge face of HMS York on the cruiser web-page at: http://www.world-war.co.uk/York/york.html) while the open bridge is rendered as a closed bridge by the addition of a roof (obviously the master-maker mistook the floor of the open bridge in the drawings he was working with to be the roof - this is one of the pitfalls of trying to translate two dimension drawings into a 3-D model). Finally, York had an enclosed armoured catwalk in the rear of her upper bridge level which is not represented in the model (nor is it evident in the drawings in Raven and Roberts or Profile Morskie, even though it is clearly evident in photos from the 30s and WWII - see the photo of HMS York in A.B.C. Whipple, "World War II: The Mediterranean," (Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, 1981) pp. 128-129). These shortcomings should be easy to fix by any modeller with some experience in accurizing in resin. Those who aren't purists will probably be satisfied with the effect obtained by building the kit straight out of the box; it looks acceptable enough as it is.
The kit is superbly engineered; it literally falls together and could be assembled in a few evenings without the aforementioned modifications. And if you want to accurize it by correcting the bridge, and some of the other shortcomings, this shouldn't take more than a few additional hours of work.
Overall, despite these criticisms, I am very pleased with this kit. Three out of four kits I buy - from all manufacturers (this includes even the best - such as Wave Line, Hi mould, White Ensign, Tamiya... you name it) have inaccuracies of some sort that need to be rectified. This kit needs more than the average amount of tweaking (at least from my point of view), but Samek has done such a nice job in so many ways, the problems are so easily fixed, the kit is so well engineered and so easy to build, and at $45 the kit is so inexpensive, that I won't hold these shortcomings against it.
I should also mention, that if you have been planning to do the HMS Exeter in her 1941-42 fit, get the Matchbox kit for the bridge and the stacks, and use the hull and main guns from the Samek HMS York (of course you'll still have to do a fair amount of scratch building and modification). The Samek HMS York should provide an excellent foundation for a beautiful HMS Exeter conversion. It's certainly better than using the Matchbox kit as a foundation.
Overall, I feel this is a wonderful kit that is fantastic value at $45. Though it has some minor shortcomings, most of these are easily rectified. In short, I highly recommend this kit for the modeller with some experience with resin, due to the delicacy of some of the parts and its complex trapezoidal paint scheme.