Kubuś

[Jakko]

Three weeks ago, at the TWENOT 50th anniversary event, I came across this kit:

I have had my eye on this for a number of years, largely because of the interesting story behind this vehicle, and for ten euros I could hardly not buy it

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On 1 August 1944, an uprising that had long been planned broke out in Warsaw, against the German occupying forces. It was lead by the Armia Krajowa ([ˈarmja kraˈjɔva], ARM-ya kra-YOH-va; this is usually translated into English as “Home Army”) because this expected the Red Army to reach Warsaw soon. The uprising was therefore intended to hasten the city’s liberation as well as to try and prevent the Soviet Union from gaining too much influence after the war, by ensuring that the city would fall into Polish rather than Soviet hands. Stalin, however, stopped his armies’ advance, which gave the Germans the opportunity to suppress the uprising, though this would take them two months despite the extreme violence they used. Not only was the city systematically shot to rubble with artillery, but when German forces encountered Poles, whether they were fighters or not, young or old, men, women or children, on Himmler’s orders they were shot dead on the spot or killed in much more horrific ways. This soon turned out to be counterproductive: exactly because of the grim fate that they could expect if they were captured by the Germans, the Poles fought harder and longer instead. By mid-September, the Germans therefore began to capture Polish fighters and treat them as prisoners of war rather than as insurrectionists. Meanwhile, negotiations had been opened between the two sides, that eventually lead to a Polish surrender on 2 October.

Very little help from outside came in during all of this. The British wanted to, and tried, but Poland was very difficult for them to reach with aircraft that could drop supplies. Stalin refused to allow Soviet-held airfields to be used for this, but eventually made a token effort by having the Soviet air force drop supplies, of which much ended up in German hands at that. The Americans didn’t want to antagonise Stalin so initially did little or nothing, and when they did get Soviet permission, their help also had little effect.

Kubuś is an improvised armoured car that the AK built on the chassis of a Chevrolet 157 truck (built under licence in Poland before the war), in a garage owned by one Stanisław Kwiatkowski. Construction began on 8 August, and it was finished two weeks later. It was armed with a Russian DP machine gun, a British PIAT anti-tank launcher, a Polish K-pattern flame thrower (also an AK product, made in occupied Warsaw) and hand grenades. Armour was only 5 to 6 mm thick, but because the builders couldn’t get their hands on armour-quality steel, the used plates from a factory and bank vans, which they installed as spaced armour with a gap of between 2.5 and 9 cm between the plates to make it proof against rifle bullets. The vehicle was used until 6 September, when it was abandoned in the city, where it stood until after the war, burned out and covered in graffiti. After the war it was moved to the Polish army’s museum and fixed up, and in 1967 it was restored using parts from a GAZ 51 truck. In 1990, the engine was replaced by one of the same type that was fitted originally, and in 2004 a replica was built for the museum that commemorates the uprising.

The name means “little Jacob”, which was both the resistance name of the recently killed wife of one of the builders, and the name of Winnie-the-Pooh in Polish.

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OK, the model … You get this in the box:

Everything is on one sprue, which has been cut into four pieces to fit it into the box. The model has a full interior, in as far as there is any, because it mainly consists of a chair, a steering wheel and some levers. The tyres are of soft, black plastic, and you can also buy a set of replacement wheels that have different tread. However, even without postage from Canada, where they’re made, these cost more than the kit they’re for. I don’t think they’re worth it for what you can actually see of the wheels.

The instructions can be viewed on Scalemates. Four pages altogether! Well, plus two for the historical background and the colour scheme The paint references are for Vallejo, so I spent a while figuring out what colours are meant with those.

[SamS]

Interesting vehicle and back story! I agree that you can’t refuse these unique kits when you find them, especially at that price!

[Jakko]

To be honest, I don’t think you would want to spend much more on it, as when you start building, you soon find that it is indeed a Mirage kit

The chassis is made up of seven parts, but the transverse ones have barely any locating pins (only the bent ones do, really), two of them seem to be half a millimetre or so too long — despite the two at the rear (bottom left in the photo) having the same part number, one is longer than the other — and which way round the bent ones should go is also unclear.

I thought to be clever by glueing the long parts to the floor first, and only then adding the transverse ones. Nope, if you stick the long beams where they look like they should go, the transverse beams don’t fit between them. You also need to ensure both of the long ones stick out beyond the floor equally far, because they don’t have locating pins either.

After a bit, I pulled them off the floor again, glued the rear transverse beam and the two bent ones between them, then stuck the lot to the floor, and only after that I added in the other two transverse beams. Make sure everything is centred and properly aligned, and then leave to dry.

On to the body:

This is three parts: two sides and the plate in front of/above the driver’s head. The sides fit much better than it looks at first, even though they don’t have any locating pins either. I held them together, flowed quick-evaporating glue into the join at the front and held that until they were stuck together. Then I went on to do this with the join in the roof and finally the rear plate. The driver’s plate doesn’t fit as well and needed a good deal of fettling, while thr vision slit in it was difficult to open up. Why Mirage couldn’t just mould a hole for the flap there and supply the flap with a vision slit as a separate part, I don’t know …

[Jakko]

On the body, I scraped and filed the seams a bit to make them less proud of the surface, and fitted the engine hatches and the grille. The hatches don’t fit well at all, and you have to work on them a good deal to get them in place.

On the bottom, I added more armour plates, at the front and rear and around the wheels. Also, the leaf springs are now on:

Oddly, those little armour plates that enclose the wheel wells towards the middle of the vehicle, do have locating pins, but the holes they are to go in are so shallow that at best, they’re a guide for where to drill the holes. Instead of doing that, I took the easier option and just cut off the pins The springs are even stranger: the front ones have large, rectangular pins at the front which look like they would positively locate the parts on the chassis — except for the fact that there are no slots for them to go into … and to make it even stranger, the instructions do show those slots! So I also cut those off and just glued the springs directly to the chassis.

The large, rectangular holes in the floor plate are the hatches for the passengers, which opened inward. The builders chose this because the double-walled construction of the body made it difficult to make proper doors in it. The kit provides parts for the hatches, but I think I’ll leave them off because they won’t be visible anyway if the top hatches are closed or there’s a figure in those. There is nothing else of the interior in my model either, because again, you can’t see any of it anyway.

[Jakko]

Construction is basically done:

One of the hatches is closed, with a few bits of plastic card underneath to prevent it falling through the opening, the other is open so I can have a figure sit in it without showing the totally empty interior too much. Mirage also gives two German-style width stanchions for the front corners, but photos in this book:

… clearly show that those may not have been on it for long. One picture from the front shows the mountings for them, but not the stanchions themselves. On the model, I did the same: cut off the undersides and only glued those to the armour.

The tow hooks are also fun. You have to stick them through the holes in the front and rear armour, and glue them to the chassis, but once more without any indicator of where or how. This is not really helped much by the chassis flexing when you push against it. In the end, I just stuck the hooks to the undersides of the chassis beams:

Because in doing this, one of the crossbeams broke off on one side, I dug out an old tube of model cement and put a big drop over all four hooks and the ends of all the crossbeams It can but help.

The wheels are also great fun: the holes have not been moulded all the way through, but just as dimples, with a note in the instructions that you have to cut them open yourself. That’s doable, but it’s not easy as such, not to mention hard to do neatly. Luckily, three quarters of them will be hidden behind the wheel armour The strangest thing is that one pair of wheels has the holes moulded with little more than a translucent web of plastic in them, but those are the inside rear wheels, where the holes will be completely out of sight … Why couldn’t they mould all six like that?

And then I had had enough for last night, because:

[barkingdigger]

I hear a set of Hussar wheels calling out to you…

[Jakko]

If it doesn’t cost at least twice as much as the kit, get here within a few days and be actually visible on the finished model, sure

[taylorrl]

The temperature at your bench sucks. But, I love your storage system for the punches.

[Jakko]

@taylorrl

The temperature at your bench sucks.

It’s in the attic, and with all the sunshine we’ve been having of late it gets quite warm up there. Opening the window and turning on a fan helps, but only for so long.

@taylorrl

I love your storage system for the punches.

I needed a good way to store them after buying both the regular (black) and hex (red) sets from RP Toolz, and it suddenly occurred to me that bits of plastic pipe would work. The white plastic is a section from a square pipe intended as a post for a balcony railing, as that way I could add slots to hold the hammers, and it’s all glued together with PVC cement, with the pipes at a slight angle so the punches can’t fall out. I then bought domed punches (green; as spares, without the die) and added another row on top. It works really well to keep everything separate so it’s easy to find the punch I need, as well as safe against breakage.

[Jakko]

The very last dregs from an aerosol of Vallejo white primer was just enough for this model:

Normally, I wouldn’t put any primer on, but the plastic is grey and the model needs to be painted grey too, so this way I can at least tell where I already put paint and where not A second reason is that I did some research to find out which paint I can use:

Top left the kit’s painting instructions, top right a Vallejo colour table showing the section with colour conversion tables, bottom an ancient Humbrol colour chart (real paint chips, not printed) which lead me to learn that Humbrol 126 is suitable for the light grey and 106 for the dark. Except I don’t have either of those, so I had to find alternatives — which the paint chip chart was very useful for. Tamiya XF-24 Dark Grey comes close enough to 106 and Hataka A082 Gris Bleu Foncé to 126. Only thing is that I don’t want to spray that last one over bare plastic, which is the other reason for applying primer

[Jakko]

And then it was grey again

About the same colour as the plastic, in fact …

The Hataka-paint was a non-starter. After shaking it well I put it into my airbrush and immediately saw it was far too dark. That turned out to be because the pigment had congealed into a big lump in the bottle, and even stirring with a wooden stick didn’t get it to mix properly again. I’m not a Hataka fan in any case, as I find it covers very poorly, but if a bottle turns unusable after being used once and then remaining closed for several years means I’m very unlikely to buy any more, I think.

But I don’t have another bottle of grey of this kind of shade … Now what? Well, the old-fashioned way, then: Vallejo Signal White plus Ammo Matt Black in a ratio of 7:3, and I had a colour close enough to Humbrol 126.

[Tank_1812]

@Jakko

About the same colour as the plastic, in fact …

Nailed the Mirage plastic color.

[Jakko]

I held a piece of sprue from the kit next to the paint, and I should have used slightly more black

[Jakko]

Over on Missing-Lynx, it was pointed out that Kubuś did have the width marker stanchions, but that the one on the left had broken off in a minor accident. Therefore, I drilled through both mounting points and made stanchions from 0.3 mm spring steel wire with a plastic disc on the end:

Now I need to find a suitable paint that matches the rest of the vehicle.

I also built a crew figure:

He’s from Tamiya’s FAMO. That’s a kit I never built, or even purchased, but when it was fairly new someone gave me all of the figures that come with it, and every couple of years I use one of them for something By scraping off the badges and the pleats in his jacket pockets he can pass for a Polish fighter well enough, I’d say. The PIAT he’s holding comes with the Kubuś kit while the DP is from Tamiya, that I painted fifteen years ago, if not more, for something I didn’t end up using it for. Mirage’s DP isn’t very good, so it’s easier to replace it with one I had already anyway.

[Francis_GL]

Hi Jakko.

A truly bizarre vehicle; I’d never seen it before. It reminds me of the makeshift armored trucks from the Spanish Civil War, especially those used by the Republican side.
From what I can see, it’s a fantastic job so far.
And the figures will look great, bringing the model to life and giving it a sense of scale.

Cheers

Francis

[Jakko]

Thanks The vehicle is a lot bigger than you would think at first glance — it’s about the size of a Sherman tank, even though it looks like it’s a good deal smaller. The figure will definitely help establish its size.