I wasn't too surprised to see that some Polish teams decided to compete in the Dakar.
Two truck makes have competed in the Dakar, Star and Jelcz.
Both brands started competing in the race in 1986.
It seems that Star had better results, but I don't have a model of the Star race truck.....
I do have a copy of the Jelcz S 442, published by Mikrus, which from what I learned from Krys from www.papermodelstore.com that Jelzc owns Mikrus.
This kit is very rough, printed on thin chipboard(think the board in a dress shirt package)
The printing is not very sharp, lots overprinting, and some shifting of the ink.
The kit does have some good build diagrams, and the thin paper parts are printed properly.
One of the quaint(Sorry Scotty) things of this kit is the handdrawn nature of the model, reminds me of some of the ABC/Czech kits which I own.
The scale of this kit is bigger than the czech kits I have, 1:25 versus 1:32, all vehicle kits from Poland are in that 1:25 scale, brings me back to when I was building cars and trucks in that scale in plastic.
Not that it is much of a stretch, I have a 1:50 truck model, and I know of two other kits by Mikrus, one a bus, and the other a city square or statue kit, both of the vehicles are Jelzc machines. It is a cool concept, I wish more companies would do this, or contract with established designers or publishing houses.
I need to finish some models for the Paper Model Convention...Back to the Mat.
