The Steyr 100/200 Cabrio was a small, relatively fast (100km/h) car built by the Austrian manufacturer Steyr-Daimler-Puch AG from 1934 to 1940. I don’t know much about cars (most of my knowledge comes from Top Gear), so I can’t pretend I am an expert; this review focuses on the quality of the kit itself. The car looked gorgeous, so there’s that.

The model is very small; the chassis and the undercarriage/seat come as individual pieces. Once you clean them off, they snap together; the fit is so good you don’t even need to use glue. The model is quite simple to assemble as the number of parts is small; we get four wheels, two alternate parts for the canvas top (one erected, one folded), and that’s pretty much it. There is a casting error on the folding canvas top; generally the quality of resin is good. The chassis has some really fine engraved lines depicting doors, panels, etc. The windscreen frame, the steering wheel and the stick for the manual transmission come as PE parts; you will need fine tweezers to handle them. The driver’s rear view mirror is missing; probably because it would be a very tiny part indeed. There are no clear parts provided, but in this scale I would not use them anyway. (Difficult to make realistic 1/72nd scale glass panels.) Due to the small scale the leaf spring suspension is not depicted, either; it would be hidden in any case.

The only issue I could find was the Steyr text on the radiator grilles; since the letters are only slightly raised details (and they are quite soft) it will be difficult to paint them well. Perhaps undercoating the grilles with silver and using a heavy black wash might be a solution. I’m not sure what the alternative would have been though; I think it would be equally difficult to deal with a tiny PE part instead.

The whole assembly including cutting the parts off the pouring block and cleaning them up took about an hour.

The painting was, well, not easy. I can’t replicate the polished-up look of luxury cars, that’s for sure. I was thinking about carefully polishing it with some polishing compound, but was worried about rubbing the paint off.

The interior was black with the leather seat and instrument panel painted in different shades of brown.

The white base coat was followed by the deep red color. I’ve used some brown in the scarlet Citadel paint, and carefully applied it with a brush. It took several layers to get a relatively even coverage, but it’s still not perfect. I thought about airbrushing but masking would have been a nightmare. The car would definitely benefit from some deeper panel lines even if it’s out of scale. (It’s always a compromise, isn’t it? A lot of the time small details need to be overemphasised so they are actually visible on a model.)

The whole thing got a gloss coat for protection. I’ve tried some black washes, but the details are way too delicate; I did not want to risk the wash over flood the white paint.

All in all the model was a breeze to build, and a bit difficult to paint. It’s a pretty cool little project for a weekend.