Magazine's model battleship that will cost £830 in parts

The model-building magazine will retail at £5.99

Readers of a magazine offering the chance to build a model of the battleship HMS Hood will have to pay a staggering £830 to collect all the parts needed to complete it.

The weekly Build A Battleship series is sold with a different part each week, but with 140 editions needed to complete the model, readers will spend more time building it than the two years it took to construct the original.

After an introductory offer of 50p for the first magazine, the price leaps to £5.99 for each issue, meaning readers will pay £831.11 to finish their masterpiece.

Hachette Partworks, the firm behind the magazine, told The Sun: "There are no comparable Hood models of this quality available. The weekly parts allow customers to spread the cost of the collection."

But pressure group Consumer Focus urged customers to be aware of the costs of model-building magazines. "Publishers should be upfront about the number of issues people will have to buy," it said.