Daimler Armoured Car (Red Sea Sharks)

The Red Sea Sharks (French: Coke en stock) is the nineteenth volume of The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. The story was initially serialised weekly in Belgium’s Tintin magazine from October 1956 to January 1958 before being published in a collected volume by Casterman in 1958. The narrative follows the young reporter Tintin, his dog Snowy, and his friend Captain Haddock as they travel to the (fictional) Middle Eastern kingdom of Khemed with the intention of aiding the Emir Ben Kalish Ezab in regaining control after a coup d’état by his enemies, who are financed by slave traders.

– courtesy of Wikipedia

The finished model:

The story:

Ahhhh… The Red Sea Sharks! For some reason this is my own personal “forgotten” Tintin adventure. I don’t know exactly what it is about this story, but I always seem to forget about it and as a result am constantly (albeit pleasantly) surprised by it.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great story. However, there are probably two main reasons why I can’t seem to get a grip on it. The first is likely because the English title by which I now usually refer to it as is so different than the original French Coke en Stock that I read as a child.

The deeper reason though, is likely because in many ways it’s a retread of so many of Hergé’s earlier Tintin tales, and so it starts to get mixed up with them in my mind. General Alcazar, the Emir of Khemed, Mohammed Ben Kalish Ezab, the Portuguese merchant Oliveira da Figueira, and Tintin’s old adversary, Roberto Rastapopoulos all appear. The gang’s all here!

Anyway, when it came time to start planning for its inclusion in my Tintin build project , the obvious choice was the Khemedi DHC “Mosquito”… and the slightly less obvious one was the Curtiss SC-1 “Seahawk”. The Mosquito, flown by the eye-patch-wearing Piotr Skut, plays a large role in the adventure, and is probably the signature vehicle from the adventure. So it should come as no surprise that Blue Rider has a wonderful set of decals for the markings, and there are several great 1/72 scale kits to choose from. As for the Seahawk, well even though it’s not nearly as prominent, I have a 1/72 scale kit from Smer in the stash and I just love sea planes, so really… any excuse.

What I hadn’t really considered though, was including the Daimler armoured car. It only appears in two panels (one of which features it getting blown to kingdom come by the aforementioned Mosquito), and it is just a bit player in the story, with no real direct connection to Tintin or his friends.

All it really has going for it is the fact that there’s a readily available and easy to assemble 1/72 scale kit from Hasegawa that can pretty much be built out of the box…

Hmm… wait a minute there. That’s quite a lot more than most of my builds have going for them at the outset. So, on the next trip down to the local hobby store, I couldn’t resist picking one up off the shelf.

The build:

The build itself was really just a side distraction from the more intensive builds for the Soviet Monoplane from Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and the Bordurian Tank from The Calculus Affair. So there’s really not much to comment on. There weren’t many parts, they all fit together spectacularly well, and then I painted it green… the right (or close enough) shade on the first try. It was so easy, in fact, that it felt like cheating so I had to do a few things like drill out the gun barrel and the view port and scribe the vents just to feel like I’d accomplished something.

About the only tricky part was having to paint some white rectangles on the turret so that I could apply transparent homemade decals (which don’t print white). I had to take a couple of cracks at it to get the size right. Originally I’d just thought to cover the white portion of the flag and make sure the rectangle was small enough that it wouldn’t create a white border around the flag. Of course I hadn’t really considered what the two-tone would do to the rest of the flag as the white background showed through from underneath, so I need to re-print a set of the flag decals a wee bit smaller.