First impressions aside....

I am finally at the point I feel I need to say something about this particular Midwest product. It is nothing like I had expected it to be, quality wise.

I bought the Midwest ARR Coast Guard lifeboat and it is a jewel. Superbly built; finished; scale fittings; and just total quality. The opposite is true of the Midwest PT boat.

First off, the fittings on this boat look like they were made by school children. They are not scale, but instead stand waaaay-off scale. They are really just ridiculously bad. The guns are not even close to scale and are made out of wood sticks. The barrel on the rear Oerlikan was even still rectangular! I had to sand it round! THe .50 cal guns are again, totally inaccurate.

The life preservers are 1/16 sheet just cut into profiles of life preservers. The deck vents were merely glossy stickers, on top of flat paint yet! The instrument panel is a glossy sticker, not even close to scale, and in the wrong place. The steering wheel is inaccurate. The searchlight is inaccurate. The compressed air bottles on the torpedo tubes are just wood dowels that were turned down in one spot. Still look like dowels...

Inside, the prop shafts were not lubed and are also carbon steel. They rusted after running the boat in my pool for 5 minutes. One motor would not even turn over when I tried to power it up a few days later. The rudders also had no lube on the shafts. Not to mention the hardware and linkage is about as cheap as possible. The props are plastic, and molded with a built in wobble. The wood formers inside the boat have not been sealed with varnish. The motors to stuffing tubes are grossly misaligned. This, on a $509 dollar model. In contrast, the Coast Guard model is $400 and easily 10 times the quality.

If I had never bought the Coast Guard boat, and bought the PT boat I would never buy another Midwest ARR again. But since I did buy the Coast Guard boat, I expected other Midwest ARR boats to be of equal quality. Unfortunately, that is not the case.

I strongly recommend against buying the Midwest ARR PT boat.