History

The Steyr 1500 was produced in Austria and housed an eight cylinder, 85hp gasoline engine, a four forward/one reverse gear transmission, a front wheel torsion bar and a leaf spring rear suspension. The all-wheel drive vehicle impressed with it's versality and on-road top speed of 100km/h. A total of 12,450 models were produced from 1941 to 1944. The vehicle was used as a staff car, HQ transport, artillery tractor and ambulance, and was particularly highly regarded for its service during the african Campaign.

The kit

The kit is packed a sturdy cardboard box with a picture of a finished, albeit not painted, model on top of it. The resin pieces are located in two re-sealable bags to prevent damage. An instruction booklet is also provided as well as a photo etched fret and a small decal sheet. I found no damaged parts in my sample.

The kit is composed of 31 beige resin parts, 40 sometimes very small photoetched parts and 10 clear parts that have to be cut out from a clear acetate sheet.

The kit's part are well molded and I found no bubbles apart from a few located on the driver's cabin piece. The level of detail is good thanks to the PE parts but sadly no stretchers are provided in the set. In fact there is no interior detail at all in the rear ambulance cabin which is sad, especially since it is possible to leave the doors open. However, scratchbuilding some stretchers and adding some details shouldn't be too difficult.

Removing the parts from the casting-plinths will require some work but this is normal. Otherwise the resin wouldn't flow correctly into the silicone molds. It will also be necessary to remove the flash over the windows openings. Apart from that, construction shouldn't be much more complicated than that of a plastic kit. The addition of photoetched parts is of course a nice touch and will bring the conversion kit to the level of the original Tamiya kit parts.

The instructions are quite nice. They are printed on two A4 size paper sheets folded so to make a small 8 pages booklet. The constructions diagrams only refer to the CMK kit parts. This means of course that you will have to use the Tamiya instructions as well.

Conclusion

This is a nice conversion kit which will allow you to add an interesting vehicle to your 1/48 scale collection. However, because of the nature of the kit, and also because of it's price, I can only recommend it to experienced modelers who don't mind to pay a little extra to have something different than the norm.

CMK's 1/48 scale Steyr 1500 Ambulance conversion set is available from www.cmkkits.com

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