BMW Motorcycle with Sidecar (Tintin in the Land of the Soviets)

Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (French: Tintin au pays des Soviets) is the first volume of The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. Commissioned by the conservative Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle as anti-communist satire for its children’s supplement Le Petit Vingtième, it was serialised weekly from January 1929 to May 1930 before being published in a collected volume by Éditions du Petit Vingtième in 1930. The story tells of young Belgian reporter Tintin and his dog Snowy, who are sent to the Soviet Union to report on the policies of Joseph Stalin’s Bolshevik government. Tintin’s intent to expose the regime’s secrets prompts agents from the Soviet secret police, the OGPU, to hunt him down with the intent to kill.

 

– courtesy of Wikipedia

The finished model:

THE (PREVIOUSLY) FINISHED MODEL:

The story:

For an adventure that I’m not all that passionate about, In the Land of the Soviets seems to generate a lot of “bonus” projects for my Tintin project. Say what you want about the plot and the storytelling, one thing you can’t really debate is just how many different vehicles Tintin manages to commandeer and subsequently crash.

So, I suppose it shouldn’t come as much surprise that I keep finding little “gems” like the BMW motorcycle with sidecar that Tintin uses to escape from the German police, and adding them to the list. One of the nice things is that, given the overall lack of detail and precision that Hergé put into this initial adventure, there’s a lot of room for interpretation.

The build:

The kit I used as the base for this build is the Hasegawa Kübelwagen & B.M.W.Side-car. According to Scalemates, this kit was original released in 1973 and I was able to get the original boxing. Since I really only wanted it for the motorcycle, I was happy to find a reasonably priced kit on eBay.

The first choice I had to make was how invested I was prepared to be in the build. The main issue is that the sidecar in the kit is on the wrong side from how it is depicted on the page. I investigated the situation, but ultimately decided that trying to adapt the sidecar to create a mirror image would have been both too difficult and unlikely to result in something I would be happy with. So I just came to the decision that, given the imprecision in the source material, Hergé probably would’ve redrawn the sidecar on the other side if In the Land of the Soviets had gotten an updated/redrawn version.

What I was willing to do was a bit of surgery on the front forks to actually allow some daylight to pass between them. This was accomplished by giving the solid piece a trim and then replacing it with a couple of small bits of polystyrene tubing. Not perfect, but good enough for me.

Given how small the kit actually is, I only used my airbrush for the main coating of Tamiya XF-57 Buff (which was as close to the source material as I could find) and the seats (XF-64 Red Brown). Luckily, I was finally able to get my hands on some Tamiya enamel paints again – which I prefer for adding small brush painted details, especially over acrylics. So I hand painted the tires (XF-85 Rubber Black), the fenders (X-1 Black) and the wheel hubs (XF-16 Aluminium). The trickiest part was painting the front forks (XF-67 Nato Green) because I had to do them with acrylic paint and it showed all the rough spots.

THE UPDATE (2024/03/19):

Y’know, there were a couple of things that always bothered me about this project. Namely a) the motorcycle didn’t REALLY look anything like the one from the album, and b) the damn side-car was on the other side!

So, after taking it upon myself to 3D design and print the Gillette Motorcycle that Tintin rides in King Ottokar’s Sceptre, it wasn’t much of a jump to design this – much simpler – motorcycle. The hardest part, actually, was re-doing the Tintin figure. I used the one from the Gillette project as a base and then added the awesome German police hat, over-sized over-coat, and boots. Luckily, using my previous post as a guide, I was able to follow the same overall colour scheme for the brush painting – which was again done with the Tamiya enamels.

If you’d like to try your hand at printing this project too, you can download my files here. Use the coupon code STROBEZ to get 50% off!

All in all, for a tiny little side project, I’m pretty happy with the result, but feel free to let me know what you think!

THE TAMIYA PAINT :

• X-1 (Black) – Fenders
• X-2 (White) – License Plate
• X-7 (Red) – Light
• X-8 (Yellow) – Headlight
• XF-16 (Flat Aluminum ) – Wheel Hubs/handlebars/muffler
• XF-56 (Metalic Grey) – Main engine components
• XF-57 (Buff) – Sidecar/gas tank
• XF-63 (German Grey) – Control Panel
• XF-64 (Red Brown) – Seats
• XF-67 (Nato Green) – Front forks
• XF-85 (Rubber Black) – Tires