Wolsely Armoured Car (The Blue Lotus)

The Blue Lotus (French: Le Lotus bleu) is the fifth volume of The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. Commissioned by the conservative Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle for its children’s supplement Le Petit Vingtième, it was serialised weekly from August 1934 to October 1935 before being published in a collected volume by Casterman in 1936. Continuing where the plot of the previous story, Cigars of the Pharaoh, left off, the story tells of young Belgian reporter Tintin and his dog Snowy, who are invited to China in the midst of the 1931 Japanese invasion, where he reveals the machinations of Japanese spies and uncovers a drug-smuggling ring.

 

– courtesy of Wikipedia

The finished model:

The (previously) finished model:

The story:

Set against the backdrop of the early Japanese invasion of China, The Blue Lotus was always a favourite of mine. I was always attracted by the bright red cover and the “mysteries of the orient” that seem to be buried within.  As a scale modeller, it also provides a great excuse to introduce some of the Imperial Japanese Army’s military vehicles into this project.

For this adventure I chose two subjects for inclusion in my Tintin project, the armoured car that the IJA uses to hunt down the fugitive Tintin (and which he later commandeers himself and uses to get back across enemy lines), as well as one of the trio of search planes.  You can check out how I made out on the Kawasaki Ki-10 over here.

While most of the vehicles that Hergé drew into his comic albums were instantly recognizable, this armoured car was a bit of a challenge to identify.  I’m inclined to believe Rajesh Sinha’s conclusion that it is indeed a Wolsely armoured car based on his thoughtful article on the subject in the Transport Journal – part of his can’t miss series covering all the cars that appear in Tintin’s many adventures.

The build:

Of course no 1/72 scale kit exists – commercial or otherwise – for this subject, so the project needed to be 100% scratch built.  I suppose I might have been able to pluck a chassis from a donor kit, but the Wolsely armoured car, at least as Hergé drew it, is basically just a box on wheels.  So I figured, how hard could it be? 🙂

Thanks to some handy drawings I found online, I already knew the shape.  So the first real trick was determining the size.  Luckily, even though there’s no model kit available, there is an official release of collectable miniature vehicles done by Atlas in 1/43 scale.  After a quick check I found out that the Atlas version rounds out at 97mm, so with some quick math that even I could handle, I figured out that the length of the vehicle would be 58mm in 1/72 scale.

Measure twice, cut three times I always say… especially if you can use the first one as a template!

By using the drawing as a template and taking measurements along the way, it wasn’t all that hard to just cut out the various geometric shapes and glue them together.  The general shape of the car came together very smoothly.  The main challenge was the wheels. Hergé’s drawing incorporates some very specific wheels.  Luckily after scrounging around in my spares box I discovered that the rear wheel off an Academy 1/72 scale MiG-21 was just about perfect.  The only problem was I only had one of them.  Not wanting to go buy two more MiG-21 kits, I decided to put my silicone mould/resin casting experience to good use and in no-time I had three more wheels (and a whole bunch of discarded bubble-filled rejects).

The biggest problem with the build was of my own making.  I was very happy using a pointed metal scribing tool to raise up some beautiful rivets along all the seams… right up until I got to the driver’s window.  I guess I didn’t reinforce that part of the structure well enough, because as I was busily punching in rivet after rivet, I suddenly collapsed the front part of the “windscreen”.  This meant I had to re-glue, re-putty and re-sand the front side – destroying the rivets I’d already punched in in the process.  The first time each of the punched holes had a nice little “rivet ridge” formed by the displaced plastic bunching up around each of them… but after sanding they were just holes, with no way to replicate the effect.  So, deciding uniformity was better, I reluctantly sanded down the rest of the rivets to match.  Too bad… it would’ve looked so much better otherwise.

THE UPDATE (2023/04/25):

Well, much like Hergé himself, I can’t resist the opportunity to go back and update/upgrade some of my Tintin projects. When I first started this project, scratchbuilding was the only choice, but since that time I’ve begun to explore the world of digital 3D model building using Blender. Strangely enough, for almost the same reasons that I decided to really start my scratchbuilding with this project (nice sharp, box-like shapes), I decided to do my first fully designed from scratch 3D model with this project as well.

If you’d like to try your own hand and printing and building the Tintin armoured car, you can get a copy of my STL files here. You can use the coupon code: STROBEZ to get 50% off.

Anyway, as always, check out the build below and tell me what you think: