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 acetate sheet. I found no damaged parts in my sample.

The kit is composed of 34 beige resin parts, 42 sometimes very small photoetched parts and 5 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. There is no wood texture on the truck bed and sides. this is not a criticism, rather the contrary, since it would be probably exaggerated in this scale. However, one can easily scribe some with a sharp cutter if needed.

Removing the parts from the casting-plinths will require some work but this is something we can expect with such a resin kit. 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 one A4 paper sheet and one A5 paper sheet folded so to make a small 6 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.

Painting instructions are rather limited and no decals are supplied so you will have to raid the spare box and hunt for references to paint the model.

Conclusion

This is a nice conversion kit which will transform the Steyr 1500 into a cargo truck. this will make it easier to include it into an aircraft diorama. However, because of the nature of the kit, I can only recommend it to experienced modelers who like to have something a bit different than the norm.

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