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I am wondering if anyone, especially in the US, has had a good experience with purchases/products from L’arsenal in the past 8 months or so, especially for 1/350 aircraft?

I do not like posting this, but after months of trying to get an order straightened out, I am fed up. Fellow modelers deserve to know to steer clear of L’arsenal at the very least until they get their stuff straightened out or sell the company to another owner who actually cares about quality and service. I have spoken with numerous ship-modelers and no one I have talked to has had a great experience with L’arsenal for a while now. Their orders have been messed up, and the prints received are sub-par and often completely useless. My personal situation (not so briefly) summed up is:

In January 2024 I placed/paid for an order for about 50 1/350 airplanes for a carrier build, along with a bunch of additional accessories.
The package arrived a month or so later, I inventoried the contents, all was accounted for, and I packed the box away for a month until I needed some of the planes for the hangar deck.
In February I was ready for the aircraft on the build, so began to work on the planes… very quickly I realized that there was something way wrong with how they were printed. Some planes had “supports” larger than the detail parts they were supposed to support on the sprue, this made removal of the planes without damage impossible. I spent over an hour carefully cutting the hundreds of oversized supports off of one single plane with a Tamiya razor saw, and the landing gear and small details all snapped off during the process. This same issue was present on many of the planes. Upon closer inspection, the issues went from bad to worse. Several planes were printed at a smaller scale (looks like 1/400) than the rest, even planes of the same type were printed at different scales. All but 3 of the planes (2 of which were wrong-scale) were completely useless for display on the flight deck. All of the planes had massive print lines from that were more pronounced than the details molded into them. Many of the planes had half-printed wings and globs of cured resin where details should have been. Quite simply, the planes were a total mess and needed to be replaced or refunded. In the same order as the planes, I also ordered a bunch of detail parts- the detail parts were printed beautifully, but they were packed in “blister packs” (Planes came in plastic baggies) and were in a different type of resin. It looked to me like the detail parts were old stock that were printed before the new owner took over operations.
I contacted Melanie, at L’Arsenal about the issues with my planes in February 2024, as soon as I realized what junk they were. Initially, Melanie said that she personally printed and inspected my order and implied that I was either an inexperienced modeler (referencing my problems removing the plane from the print raft) or that I was being too picky about the quality (referencing 100s of recent orders without any complaints). I responded to Melanie’s email with pictures of the planes I received, and her response acknowledging that the planes I received were crap quality was that “They had an issue with one of their printers, so they had someone else print some orders, and mine must have slipped through the cracks of their quality control inspection”….

Remember when Melanie said that she personally printed my order and inspected it herself???

Melanie then asked me for a list of what planes out of my order needed to be replaced; I did not want to seem like I was trying to get free products, so I took the time to remove ALL of the planes they sent me from the print rafts and shoot them with some primer to see if any were salvageable. The results were that one single plane out of the 50-55 I had ordered was printed properly. I relayed this information to Melanie, and that is when communication went dark. I sent numerous emails and after weeks and weeks and a few public forum posts eventually Melanie started sporadically responding to some of my emails requesting the list of planes I needed again several times, and each time assuring me that she was going to reprint my order.
In May 2024, I finally received my replacement order… it contained one single e-2 hawkeye on a print raft in the bottom of a shipping box with no invoice and a crumpled page from a French language magazine. I again contacted Melanie at L’arsenal, and she told me she remembered packing my entire order, and asked me if the box was opened or damaged when I got it. I told her that it was a used box labeled “700 masters” and that the box looked too small to have ever held my entire order in the first place (and I included pictures). Melanie then said that she had people helping pack and ship orders before her move to Morocco, and that my order must have gotten sent to another customer who kept the planes and never told L’Arsenal about the mistake. Melanie then reminded me that she is “losing a lot of money on my order” but said that she would reprint it though she would not be able to get to it until August. Now here we are almost to the middle of September and once again Melanie is not responding to emails. So what is the truth? Did Melanie personally pack my replacement order, or was it one of the supposed helpers? Sounding like a lack of integrity to me when the story keeps changing.

Now I am aware that Melanie has posted here and on other forums saying she has some health issues as well as issues with the move to Morocco, as well as a lot of tales of woe regarding the move, tech issues with her printers, and unscrupulous moving companies. I am not without sympathy and understanding… to a point... However, L’arsenal is still taking new orders, they are still in business (for how long given their behavior is so suspect, I don’t know); I recently started trying to find another 3d maker of the planes I need, and last week I came across an ebay vendor based in the US that had a shop full of L’Arsenal 3d planes and stuff. I sent the ebay vendor a message asking if they print the L’arsenal planes in-house, since I wanted to be able to make sure there was some quality control. The vendor told me that they do not print the L’arsenal planes, they got them direct from L’arsenal, and have been selling their products for the last 3 months to many customers and have not had any quality complaints in that time…

…So L’arsenal is apparently capable of printing quality products en-mass to supply a new ebay vendor, but somehow does not have the printers available to make right on orders that have been paid for almost a year ago? Sorry, this is where my patience has hit a wall, there is no excuse as far as I am concerned. L’Arsenal 1.0 earned a reputation for quality and service that was well deserved, I have been using their resin products for the better part of 20 years, but L’arsenal 2.0 seems to be just cashing in on (and simultaneously trashing) the reputation the previous owner earned over all the years in the ship community.

L'Arsenal/Melanie, you need to correct the outstanding issues that you have created with your customers, plain (or PLANE) and simple. Taking money from new customers, offering sales etc, and supplying distributors while ignoring customers who have already paid you and received garbage products is akin to stealing our money.

In the interest of full transparency on my part, I was able to make use of a number of the planes I received by positioning them creatively in the hangar bay to hide their many flaws, but this was only done in order to save the Tamiya/trumpeter/old resin planes I had planned for the hangar in case I could not find quality 3D printed ones for the flight deck.
To whoever designed the 3D files for the planes l’arsenal sells, the design is great, and if someone prints them properly, they make for beautiful planes, far better than any plastic or resin ones I have ever seen or used.

IF L’arsenal / Melanie ever do make good on my order, I will happily amend my comments, but at this point I am not holding my breath.
Ryan Labieniec