Ebay had this listed 11 days ago. $375 is a bit rich for me and most rocketeers.
Can somebody say they owned one and flew it? What was the original price?
It was made by SpaceCraft X-15A-2 kit distributed by SpaceCraft British Model Rockets in small batches and hard to get. Too bad Scott couldn't get one to put in the cloning section.

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If it flies, I can crash it!

I have seen a few come up from time to time but never at that price. Wanted to purchase one of Paul's vacuform V2 kits but they seem to be rare also.

Paul is a member here, although I'm unsure when he last logged on.

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Scott D. Hansen
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I have three of his kits. Two of the X-15 and one of the delta. When I corresponded with Paul he always made me promise that I would not put them on eBay. Paul was very helpful in providing me with missing instructions for the delta even though it was a few years out of production.

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"The complexity of living is eminently favored to the simplicity of not."

First, by way of introduction, here is a picture of me with my very favorite rocket 2 weeks ago, X15-A2 at the U.S. Air Force Museum in Dayton, OH.

Also by way of introduction, I have built some REALLY difficult scale models, including my Apollo Pad Abort which I flew for the U.S. team in Slovakia two years ago.

I have a Paul Clark X15-A2 kit which sits partially completed in my basement. My good friend, Mark C., who has won numerous NARAM scale championships, also has a partially completed Paul Clark X15 in his basement. It is highly doubtful that either of us will ever complete ours, and we both agree it is the most difficult, frustrating kit we have ever attempted.

If an Estes Saturn V, is a skill level 5, then Paul's kit is at least a 10. The kit is by no means a scratch build. Paul provides you with a number of parts which would be extremely difficult to fabricate yourself. But the combination of materials used and techniques required conspire to make this kit highly unlikely to produce a result you will be satisfied with. The bottom line is that the kind of builder capable of constructing this kit is very unlikely to be satisfied with the result.

What follow is some photos and explanations of the kit itself, as mine currently sits.

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This is how my kit currently sits.

This is basically a paper-folding kit. You mark the tube, cut out and fold and glue all the various parts, then attach them to the tube.

As you can see from the tube, I progressed to the point where I had attached a number of the attachment aids.

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You begin this kit by marking the body tube for all of the parts that will be attached. Even this first step is quite daunting. Paul supplies you with a paper template which will be taped to the tube to help you mark the lines. The first thing you have to do is cut numerous triangular and oblong holes in the template so that when you tape it to the tube you can put pencil marks at the corners of where you will then draw lines. There are a LOT of template holes to cut. Once you have it on the tube you make little corner marks. But when you remove the template it takes a lot of patience and head scratching to figure out which corners connect to which. then you do your best to draw straight lines. Obviously any little errors here will be magnified in the final model.

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Next comes cutting out and assembling all the paper pieces. Paul made a very interesting choice with the material used here. It is a plastic-coated cardstock. Why he chose this particular material I have no idea but it is quite different from any other cardstock I have used and is difficult to work with.

I do a lot of cardstock modeling and the reason I like it is that you can print several versions of a part, easily assemble them with white glue, and if you don't like the way the part came together you can quickly do another.

Unfortunately many of the parts in this kit are too big to fit on a scanner, so you can't print extras. The plasticized paper means you are pretty much stuck using CA or rubber cement.

Another thing you wlll notice from the photos is that there are foam board inserts which go in a number of the parts. The edges of a number of these parts have to be beveled, which was quite difficult to do nicely.

As can be seen in the final photo, even if the paper parts are constructed as instructed, there are still significant gaps in some of the pieces.

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It was interesting in discussing this kit with Mark that we independently gave up at similar points. We each realized that the parts for the two sides were similar, but not exactly the same, that there was no way to be sure that the attachment points on the body tube were true, and that once the shell was completed there would be a huge amount of body work required to fill seams and gaps. We were each used to a lot of finishing work but the inadequacy of the parts we'd already constructed suggested a slim chance of a finished model worth the additional effort required, so we each gave up and moved on to other projects.

That said, and I realize this is a fairly discouraging review, I don't want to diminish the fact that Paul Clark put a huge amount of effort into this kit. I, too, was missing parts when I received my kit and contacted Paul, and he was very helpful. The kit does have everything you need to make a big, flyable, very scale model of the X15-A2. The decals look first rate, the vacuform parts are way sturdier than usual, and although Paul made choices in materials I, perhaps, wouldn't have made, he definitely didn't do anything cheaply. There was clearly a ton of effort and thought put into this kit.

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Final thoughts. For what the ebay lister is asking, I think you'd be much better off buying the Hangar 11 4 inch version, or a Shrox X15, if you can find one.

Steve