After a massive scratch building job on my 1/35th scale Werner’s Wings MH-47E I needed something simple. Quick. Easy. I needed a Tamiya kit.

Many of you may remember the old Bandai 1/48th scale series of military vehicles. Until Tamiya revived the scale with modern renditions in this scale Bandai was the only game in town for 1/48th scale armor. One of the unique vehicles that Bandai put out was the BMW R-75 motorcycle with sidecar. Finding these was always a pain. I built one of them a long while ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. Could Tamiya do better? That is a rhetorical question.

Packaged in a sturdy 6 x 9 cardboard box with typical quality box art the modeler is treated to a single sprue of light tan plastic wrapped in plastic along with a small decal sheet. The instructions are printed on a long scroll of high quality paper in typical high quality fashion. There is a small decal sheet of license plates and some unit emblems.

The plastic is flash free and allows you to build a German motorcycle, not a BMW R-75 as that would require licensing fees. The motorcycle can be built with a couple of options, such as an engine filter, MG-34, three soldiers, saddle bags, or tentage. The actual motorcycle consists of 18 pieces and the basic sidecar is four or six depending on accessories.

Tamiya has two different marking options, one in Wehrmacht Panzer Grey for 1942 Russia and the other in Panzer Yellow from a Luftwaffe Parachute Regiment in Tunisia in 1943. There is another marking options for a Luftwaffe machine, but it is not illustrated.

Construction is very straight forward and easy. It is a Tamiya kit after all. This is more a painting exercise than construction. You can literally build this model in a night or two depending on your paint preferences. I built mine in a night and painted and decaled it the next day. Well there are only three decals. The decals worked just fine. I recommend that you trim the decals close to the white to get rid of the carrier film. If you do that they are perfect. I painted mine Tamiya German Grey. It really is that easy.

A little weathering with some Mig Pigments to represent mud and a light dusting and the model was done. One nice feature is that the front forks are poseable, something that Bandai isn’t.

I elected not to put on the machine gun or the figures. They are nice but soldiers in full battle gear are not appropriate for an airfield motorcycle. Now the only thing to do was to put it onto a base.

If you want to build something quickly and for a change of pace this is an awesome model. Heck this is an awesome model no matter what. I thoroughly enjoyed it and like the end results. I’ll be putting this next to my next model, the Eduard Bf-109.

Highly recommended

Thanks to Tamiya and IPMS/USA for the review item. You can obtain yours at your local hobby shop or online retailer.