Since the last post I finished the figures and continued to build the bike. Below are some pictures of the two soldiers:

And now the news from the BMW bike:

After the failed builds of the Masterbox kits, I decided to build the frame of the bike from brass tubes and rods. This turned out to be a nice idea, as metal is much more stable than plastic (and also looks much better). I then also built the fork for the front wheel from brass parts.

I also bought the BMW R75 kit from Italeri. All in all this kit is not very good, but the engine is very nicely detailed, especially the cooling fins on the cylinders are much better detailed than the ones from the Masterbox kit.

The bike itself is now almost finished, apart from some details. The side car is still waiting to be build…

And this is how the bike looks now:

The bike is a mixed build from two different Masterbox kits, some Italeri parts, the PE parts from Masterbox and a lot of scratch built parts made from brass and copper.

One comment on the PE parts from the Masterbox kit. They are made from brass, but covered with a thin coating. So it is almost impossible to glue or solder them. The solution to this problem is visible on the pictures: simply sand the PE parts cautiously, until the coating is removed (at least partly), and now both the  superglue and the solder work as expected.

So after some frustrations at the beginning, the build was fun until now, and I am looking forward to continue with the side car and of course to paint the model. And one more comment: the reference material available on the web from BMW proved to be really, really helpful.