Sylvan Scale Models HO Pickup Truck

A product review by Doug Murray,
as seen in the Maritime Branchline

Road vehicles have always been a model railroading problem. Cheap ones usually look like out of scale toys. The really nice ones often cost more than good quality rolling stock-which seems a bit much, considering that vehicles are background accessories not the main attraction. So it was a real pleasure to stumble onto Sylvan Scale Models line of 19 different HO scale vehicle kits. The series, consisting mainly of trucks, but with a few cars thrown in, broadly covers the early Steam Diesel transition era.

I chose to build Sylvan's Kit # V-007, a 1937 Pickup Truck. The polyurethane resin kit was beautifully molded in white with loads of fine detail, and without the air bubbles and pits found on some resin kits. There were approximately 15 pieces in the kit, with very minimal "flash", and the whole thing was carefully engineered to go together quickly and well. There are two particularly nice features in these Sylvan kits. Each comes with a single vacu-formed clear windshield/side/rear window piece which you "pop" in after painting the kit and before final assembly. A neat way around the fiddly problem of painting door frames around pre-cast clear glass such as on Williams Bros. vehicles, and since it's a vacu-form, you  can cut out the driver side window with scissors or a hobby knife before installation to simulate a rolled down window. The second feature is the use of "real" rubber tires, which are pressure fit onto their hubs after painting the tires and hubs separately. Once again, time-consuming painting problem is avoided.

Two pieces I did not incorporate into my model were the steering wheel (hardly visible) and the driver figure (unnecessary in a parked vehicle). I'll probably include the figure on my next kit, Sylvans V-004, a White Super Power Tractor which, by the way, includes a fret of etched metal mirrors. All in all Sylvan's 1937 pickup was a superb little kit. With quick dry acrylic paints you could easily do a complete build in one night while watching TV. Many thanks to Maritime Hobbies & Crafts for providing the sample build kit, which can be seen in their store, and to Sylvan Scale Models for a great series of vehicles. I highly recommend that you check them out at www.isp.ca/sylvan , where you'll find a photo of each one.