introduction

The Horch 108 Typ 40 is a wide-body staff car built by the Germans at the start of WW2. Darren Baker gave an in-box review of this kit back in June 2015, so here is a follow-up full build.

contents

The box art was good, and opening the box revealed six sprues in plastic with 1x rubber sprue & 1x clear plastic sprue. There was a good plan sheet which is fairly well detailed albeit with a few minor problems. The moulding quality is crisp and detail is good to excellent. The plans booklet has 24 pages with 73 build sections and 2 pages of colour schemes for variations in colour scheme and markings.

The Build

ChassisThe build starts with the engine and leads onto the chassis. It has a nice engine and chassis build up, but a very delicate chassis-to-sprue attachment with 14 points which leaves a lot of cleaning up and is a bit excessive. Basic chassis build is fairly good and straight forward, but pay attention to part A34 as there are no aligning pins so you need to align the axle casing ribs by sight. The axle part shown as A77 on the plan should read as part no A71 as part A77 on the sprue is a seat back frame, so the parts numbers have obviously been incorrectly stamped. Wheel hubs (parts A37) required careful alignment as there were no positive stop points so again it had to be aligned by eye. Parts D1 and D26 which run between front and rear hubs on each side of the chassis are extremely thin and very easily broken when removing from the frame, and are awkward to fit as they don’t seem to line up very easily. Part A83 the torsion bar at the front of chassis is again very thin and broke when removing from the sprue, This was replaced with a section of evergreen rod (see photo) as once broken it was not worth trying to repair. Exhaust parts D2 D6 and D21 again are too thin and brittle and easy broken when removing from their frames.

Body assembly
The body sides are a good fit to the floor pan and took very little clean up. The remainder of basic body sections went together well until the fitting of part D22 (a handle loop) which fits on top of the rear deck - the handle seems too wide to match the locating holes and left a bit of a mess when finally fitted in place due to the excess glue required to fit this part. At stage 39 I would leave out the fitting of the spare wheel and tyre until after painting has been completed. It is a slightly tight fit but can be done with a little care and effort, and this did drop in quite easily after all. After fitting the seating do not fit rifles or other accessories as detail painting of these items must be done first, so I would suggest that they be added at the end of the build. Again when fitting the screen surround don’t fit the glazing until after painting has been completed and the same with the headlights, since the glazing does fit quite easily without too much fuss. Fitting of front grille and hood was hopeless and it took forever to turn a really bad fit into something mildly acceptable, this resulted mainly from part B8 being the cause and B9 needing a slight adjustment, also be very aware that the grille slats have been produced extremely thin and fragile as the cost of achieving better detail. The kit in general isn’t too bad but it is let down by a badly fitting hood and grille whichever way you choose to fit it. The decals were easy to apply, with however a small let down of way too much carrier film, but were of fairly good detail and the final application of these looked quite good with a little trimming of the carrier film.

conclusion

Overall this made into a quite acceptable model, but not one that will be suitable for a less experienced modeller due it being a kit of very fragile parts which could be off-putting to someone tackling a kit of this type for the first time.