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Hola Friends of Russian Heavy Metal, I have started a hurry up project, building a resin kit of a Lada Niva as a present for my wife for Christmas. It is planned to add a wooden base, showing the shape of the island were we life. I wrote down the story behind this project in the 'what did you just get thread' and copied it here, to get the whole picture together. After a little odyssey the postman brought me this little gem, directly from Hungary. It's a 1/35 kit of a Lada Niva, made by Balaton and will be my next project as a Christmas gift for my wife. There is some personal history behind the Niva, which started with a completely different car though. Since getting the drivers license, eighteen years old, my wife wanted to own a Citroen 2CV, but never really managed to get one for multiple reasons. We were very close to buy one in Portugal some years ago, which was in perfect condition, but we had to be back in Berlin four days later, with no possibility to change and found it too risky to do the 2700 km with such an old car. Later we settled on our steep little island in the Atlantic, where even my biased wife realized, that a 2CV would not be sufficient for the type of terrain here (I buried my plan of owning a Goddess, a Citroen DS23 as well for the same reason). To stay with classics, we tried to buy a new Lada Niva instead, which is well suited for our nice offroad tracks. Three years ago, it was possible to buy a Niva in the mainland of Spain, but it was seemingly impossible to import one onto our Canary Islands. A year ago we tried to buy a new Niva in Germany from a retailer, specialized on Lada Niva. By that time he refused, because it would be impossible to get it legalized in Spain, because the Spanish Lada dealers ceased business meanwhile and you couldn't get a Lada Niva homologized anymore. Out of pure frustration (and a lot of desire too) we bought our Jeep as one of the last dinosaurs, with the Landrover Defender - err - rejuvenated . After some wine, there sometimes are some sentimental remarks about the missed chance of having a Lada Niva from my wife. When I saw the resin kit of the Niva I knew, i had to build it for my wife and now I'm on a tight schedule before Christmas, as there should be a wooden base, with the shape of our island, also. Cheers Rob