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[/url]Skoda-001 by N.T. Izumi, on Flickr
I was really surprised when Takom announced an injection molded kit of this very unusual Czech pre-WW II armored car. I am drawn to weird subjects, so I instantly fell in love with the design. The real thing was loved much less so, as it was big, heavy, under powered, and had poor cross-county performance due to its skinny tires and low ground clearance. According to the kit box, only a dozen were built, three going to the Vienna police and the remainder being belatedly accepted by the Czech police. Nevertheless, it looks like a really cool sci-fi steam punk vehicle, and has some crazy paint schemes!
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[/url]Skoda-002 by N.T. Izumi, on Flickr
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[/url]Skoda-003 by N.T. Izumi, on Flickr
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[/url]Skoda-004 by N.T. Izumi, on Flickr
https://flic.kr/p/vJ3DB4]
[/url]Skoda-005 by N.T. Izumi, on Flickr
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[/url]Skoda-006 by N.T. Izumi, on Flickr
Takom's kit comprises a slide molded body shell, with most of the remaining parts duplicated to form the nearly symmetrical front to rear vehicle. The real thing featured four wheel drive and the ability to be driven in either direction so it is not surprising that the parts look the same. I suppose it saved Takom some tooling costs to provide duplicate sprues, but I found the floor pan and ladder frame breakdown created extra seam filling work. Plus the ladder frame is visibly hollow on the ends, which could have been avoided if the entire frame was molded as a single part. I went the lazy route and just left it as is.
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[/url]Skoda-013 by N.T. Izumi, on Flickr
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[/url]Skoda-017 by N.T. Izumi, on Flickr
The wheel well inserts fit poorly to the body shell, requiring some fairly heavy trimming of the body where the mismatched slide mold lines were. If this is ignored, the inserts push out the body shell, which will lead to gaps along the rocker panels. I found the fit of this kit to be generally "not too good", with lots of trimming and sanding being required. The upper cab is made up of four quadrants, which require adjustment to fit properly. These must be fettled for a close fit, as there are a lot of rivets at the join lines that need to be protected. The drive components and machine guns did not align precisely, and I breifly considered replacing the guns with machined brass aftermarket items. But in the end, I felt it would be a waste of perfectly good aftermarket parts, so I just scraped and filed the wonky kit gun barrels as best as I could.
https://flic.kr/p/xwLBRp]
[/url]Skoda-012 by N.T. Izumi, on Flickr
Now for the scary part - painting the crazy-quilt scheme! This will be the first time I will be using Silly Putty to mask off the colors. Paints have been selected.
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[/url]Skoda-019 by N.T. Izumi, on Flickr
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[/url]Skoda-019a by N.T. Izumi, on Flickr
Any tips on using Silly Putty would be greatly appreciated!