Building the Tamiya Honda MB50Z 1/6 scale English

Motorcycles

Building the Tamiya Honda MB50Z 1/6 scale

by Guy Golsteyn © Modeler Site

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I have a strong nostalgic band with this bike. My first motorized vehicle was a Honda MT50, the trial version of a Honda MB50, which was more like a street machine. Back in 1979 I hesitated for a while about which model I would purchase, but since my brother went for the MT I decided to do the same.

The MB was faster than the MT, but we lived in a woody environment and we had more fun with our trial bikes driving off-road trough the forests, which turned out to be a clear advantage when the police tried to hunt us down in their police van. They never caught us…

OK. Back to the Honda MB. Unfortunately Tamiya doesn’t have the MT in its range, so I opted for "the next best thing". The MB has the same engine, and a lot of other identical accessories, but the chassis is significantly different, purely focused on speed. The Tamiya kit of the MB has become a very scarce gem, and you will not encounter it very often, unless Tamiya would consider a reissue.

Starting the build

The chassis consists of eleven separate parts to be assembled. After assembly, the chassis was cleaned up and all the seams were sanded off. Tubular chassis like this one always require a lot of sanding, and because you can’t reach every spot with simple sanding paper I use a " flex file '. The whole operation of assembling and cleaning up the bike’s chassis took about half a day, and then the sub-assembly was ready to be put in primer.

Next I concentrated on the body parts. The fuel tank parts and the bike’s rear end were trimmed and prepared as well, but this took less time in comparison to the chassis. Before we tackled the cowling, rear suspension arm and front fender I did a dry fit of the chassis and tank parts: everything fitted just nicely. Although this is a quite old kit, it is still Tamiya quality and it shows!