Military Wheels 1:72 Lublin-51 - opening the box.

Another 1:72 scale kit, and another army truck. This time its a Lublin-51, which is a Russian Gaz 51 built under licence in Poland. The kit is for an early wooden cabbed lorry, later Gaz/Lublin 51s had steel cabs.

Military Wheels are another Ukrainian company. Instructions are, like the recent ICM kit that I built, written in both English and Russian.

Four runners, including the glazing, are included. Here's the cab and windows;

There's quite a bit of flash present, this is one of the cab sides;

Chassis and load bed;

Apart from flash there's also some very heavy mould lines, especially on the main chassis frame. Some parts also lack detail, for example the leaf springs lack relief.

The instructions state that 'the model is executed on technology short run and is intended only for experienced modelers' (sic);

I guess that means that they don't expect to sell or produce many kits or they haven't got a large budget for tooling.

A nice simple paint scheme;

It looks like it might be a challenging build, there's certainly a lot of cleaning up to do, however I like the prototype and with care this should build into a nice model.

As information on these is scarce I bought a service manual for the Russian Gaz-51;

It is of course in Russian. The cover shows a steel cabbed lorry, inside there's a drawing of a wooden cabbed version;

Also I found a photo on eBay of a Gaz being used in Latvia;

This was bought (from a seller in the US of A) as the photo shows a wooden cabbed lorry as per the kit. I really must stay off eBay, although it does amuse me to think that someone in Belarus is no doubt wondering why an Englishman would want a workshop manual for an ancient Russian lorry...

Narrow gauge railway enthusiasts might like to note that the Gaz-51 was used as the basis for a number of draisines (rail mounted trucks), commonly used on logging lines, especially in Romania.

Paul.