What is accurizing?

Accurizing is the achievement of a level of detailing and accuracy which the model kit does not provide. In most cases, it means things like:

Drilling out all the openings and gun barrels
Making thin parts thin (aircraft cowl flaps, tank fenders, ship railings, etc.)
Getting square shapes square and round shapes round (this is harder than you would think)
Getting dimensions right, even if it means scratchbuilding 95% of the model (rare but there are times when it is the only way)
Getting angles and proportions right
Getting surface detail right (with tanks and ships, this means adding nuts, bolts, and rivets; with aircraft and cars, taking them off)

{Cookie Sewell}

Basically, accurization kits attempt (and usually succeed) at correcting some deficiency in the injected styrene kit. In some cases, the accurization kit is maybe a bit of resin or two and some photo-etch. For instance I've bought a DML accurization kit for M-48/M-60 tanks that fits this description. In the realm of photo-etch this usually makes a lot of sense. Replicating sheet metal vents in 1:72 or even 1:35 in injected styrene is all but impossible.

When large amounts of resin gets involved, the accurization kit is tackling a much more ambitious problem with the kit. A woefully inaccurate profile of an aircraft nose, or totally incorrect pairing of turret with tank chassis (for a particular variant).

The only problem with these accurization kits is that most of them are as expensive as the original kit. So in a measure of accurization, you can easily double the price you pay for building a particular kit. I'm not claiming that accuracy isn't a good thing. Its just that I built more models per year when I just built things out of the box. Admittedly, what I was building were starships made by a company that only believes in making toys, not accurate replicas.
{Andrew Madison}

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