Scale Plastic & Rail

1/35 Polizei-Kübelsitzwagen ab 1937 from MasterBox

1/35 Polizei-Kübelsitzwagen ab 1937
German military car, WWII era
Catalogue # MB35101
List price about GBP 20.00 or Euro 24.00
See Master Box´s distributor list for availability in your area.

Kübelsitzwagen? I am German, but I am more familiar with the word "Kübelwagen", that means bucket car in English. But I learned that Kübelwagen is an abbreviation for "Kübelsitzwagen", or bucket seat car. So, doing reviews makes you smarter!
Reading Master Box´s labelling of this kit here this one is a bucket seat car used by the police. I could not find any information if this means just the civilian police or the military police but I guess it is the latter one for the subheading "German military car, WWII era" on the box.

I think most of our valued readers have heard of the German Kübelwagen of WWII era built by Volkswagen. This car got famous as "the Kübelwagen" but this word is just an umbrella term for this type of cars. With the German rearmament the military looked for a fast way to equip with suitable vehicles.

(Picture taken from the type 170 V parts catalogue)

The Mercedes-Benz type 170 V limousine was build from 1936 – 1942 and has been produced after WWII again! For its time it was a very sophisticated car featuring swing axles in the front and rear and an x-shaped frame constructed of oval tubes. This gave the car superior easy to handle and safe driving characteristics. For this it is not really surprising the military got notice of this car.

But the 170 V (the suffix "V" stands for "Vorne" meaning a front engine) had to be modified to the military´s conception. So all this "luxury" stuff of a limousine had to go, altering the car to a military vehicle. The seats were replaced by a more simple construction that looked like sitting in a bucket. The doors had to go being replaced by four pieces of canvas to enable the soldiers to get out of the car more quickly to enter a fight. The trunk compartment had to go, too, making the car even lighter. So a lot of simplification and modification took place, making the Mercedes-Benz 170 V the very first Kübelsitzwagen or Kübelwagen what is an easier to vocalise word and got famous all over the world. Construction of its more familiar successor, the Volkswagen type 82 Kübelwagen, started not until 1938, so the 170 V was the first one.

Master Box´s kit comes in an end-opening box 27 x 19 x 5 centimetres in size. The box top artwork shows the car in colour in front of a gloomy b/w background showing the ruins of a destroyed town with an old and frail lady walking by. Surely one of the more touching pictures I have seen on a kit´s box.

The box´s sides show the usual safety precautions on one and four CAD drawings of the model on the other side. On the backside of the card board box Master Box placed the painting guide showing a picture of a built and painted model and seven different views to guide for painting details and placement of the decals. The colour chart only mentions Vallejo Model Air and Model Color paints. I think Master Box could at least mention Gunze and Tamiya paints, too. Maybe they will find some space on the VERY large assembly manual? More on this later...

This kit´s grey plastic parts are on SIX sprues counting in the clear parts and the sprue with the tyres. All of these are packed together in a clear resealable plastic bag with the decals, the five tyres and the clear parts packed separately in additional plastic bags of their own. This effort paid as the clear parts in my sample were perfectly clear with not a single scratch on them! The clear parts are this glossy I see no need to have them dipped in Future.

Despite this little car will only get about 12 centimetres long when build there are about 180 parts given to be assembled by the modeller, with some of them greyed out in the instruction manual because these will be needed in at least one other version of the MB 170 V. This large parts count for such a petite model does not include any individual track links as in other military vehicle kits!

The decal sheet is about 61 x 35 millimetres in size. Printing is very good and precise with nearly no carrier film visible around the individual images. There are registration plates for FIVE different cars used by the Feldgendarmerie (Pol) or "Field-Gendarmerie" with other cars used by the Feldpolizei (FP) or "Military Police". There is a white badge on the decal sheet that should be placed on both sides of one of the cars. The real badge shows some wings holding a circle with a swastika in it. Master Box did not only leave the swastika out of the decal but in addition placed a small black rectangle in place of the non-existent swastika. This black rectangle not only is unnecessary but also is covering small piece of the empty circle on my sample, rendering it useless in case I would have chosen to do this variant. Last but not least we get three small white instrument faces to be applied to the dashboard.

Some contemporary pictures shown on Master Box´s website show cars with registration plates provided in the kit. A closer look shows the typeface on the decal plates to be slightly different but I have to confess that this is really nitpicking here...

The kit´s FIVE tyres are made in a soft black plastic and show the typical military pattern used in WWII and later. The moulding of these is very good with some small lettering of the size on the tyre wall. One has to get really close to see a faint mould separation line on these, so no need to get them in the freezer to be able to eliminate this!

The sprues of this kit show no or only the tiniest amount of flash on the parts, nothing to care about! But the detail on the parts has to be seen!

The first of FOUR grey plastic sprues, Sprue A, comprises the car´s frame, the engine and gearbox parts (simply fantastic!), the cooler, leaf-spring packs, a delicate steering gear, drive shafts, the exhaust and a very lot of other small parts.

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I am especially impressed by the details of the engine and gear box parts! Add some ignition wires and you have a little jewel in your hands!

Sprue B has parts for the front and back bucket seats, the engine bulkhead with the windshield frame, a nicely detailed dashboard, the spare tyre rim with a minuscule hex nut holding it in its centre, folding top frame, and two stowage boxes with tiny locks on them, to mention only a few of the parts.

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The first parts I noticed on Sprue C has been the engine bonnet parts and the wheel rims. The latter even have tiny valves moulded in! Master Box proofs what can be shown in this scale, so some other major manufacturers may listen! The wheel caps sporting the Mercedes star are separate parts so the modeller has the decision to add them or just show the five perfectly moulded wheel nuts on one or more wheels. I like to have the choice here! Furthermore we have parts for the drum brakes, a beautiful radiator grille, a steering wheel, the lights with separate blackout covers, a Notek head lamp, an assortment of door knobs (not to be used here) and bonnet catches, two very finely moulded fenders (beautiful!), and... a Mercedes-Benz star to be glued on top of the radiator grille. Despite this model being a military car I would dare to paint this one in chrome colour!

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Last is Sprue D with only three parts on it. One of these is the undercarriage with the mud wings. This part is perfectly straight with no warpage at all, showing some very nice detail on the rear mud wings as we can see it on the contemporary pictures. Don´t sand the fine line near the bolts on the rear mud wings. This line should be there! Moulding is exact and flawless with a satin finish on it. Don´t ask how often I played with this part and admired the look of it!

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Remember me mentioning that the assembly manual being large at the beginning of this review? It is! Each of the four pages printed in b/w is about 30 x 42 centimetres! Opened up on your working desk the manual gets 60 centimetres wide! Only the assembly manual of my 1/24 scale Airfix Mosquito is as large as this one. There are some newspapers that are not this big!

The first page of the assembly manual has the usual remarks about safety when working with paints and glue, hints on how to apply the decals, and a short summary of the real car´s history and technical specifications in English, German and Russian.
What I really like is a box with additional remarks about this kit being super-detailed (it is!) and an emphatic advice to have a look at a link to Master Box´s website with further pictures and recommendations on how to build this kit step-by-step. A nice touch, although I cannot find any "recommendations of step-by-step model assembly" but some useful pictures.

On the bottom of page 1 we have an overview about the sprues and contents of this kit with the not needed parts greyed out.

Page 2 and 3 of the assembly manual shows how to build the engine (nine steps to assemble an engine that is about 30 millimetres long!), the undercarriage frame, the wheel suspension and a very lot more of this. There are 22 steps here without having touched the cars body so far!

Assembly of the vehicle bodywork starts at the end of page 3, to be continued on page 4 with another whopping twenty-seven steps until the bodywork finally gets fixed to the undercarriage. The very last picture on page 4 shows four different variants how to build this vehicle. I prefer the one with the opened engine bonnet for not to hide this little jewel there!

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I was sold on this model brimming with details when I compared the kit´s parts to pictures of the original vehicles parts catalogue from 1939:

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(Picture taken from the type 170 V parts catalogue)

So what do we think?
With the recent wave of models of German WWII military cars from different companies these days Master Box made their entry with a big bang! To put it blankly I am very impressed by this model, by the finesse of some of most of the parts and Master Box addiction to replicate even the tiniest detail if only this is possible by plastic injection moulding!

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Master Box also offers the Mercedes-Benz 170 V as a touring car. We will have a look at this kit as soon as time permits. In the meantime whet your appetite on Master Box´s website of the touring car here.

Definitely very highly recommended! Get one!

My very best thanks to the bodacious people at Master Box for the review sample!
To find your local distributor, click this link.

Thomas Mayer