The Tiger I

Tiger in Bovington tank museum. Picture by Harry Harris.

The kit

The kit is absolutely massive. The box weighs in at about 9 kilo's and is very sturdy. It has a stylish black outer sleeve around the whole thing, which gives it the look of an expensive kit. There's also some general information on the front of this sleeve, including a list of what the tank can do. In short, it does everything the real tank did, except shoot projectiles and scare the hell out of the enemy troops.

Taking off the sleeve, there's the actual box with an excellent drawing of the tank staring right at you. The size of the box makes this drawing look quite impressive. There's a flap in the front which opens up to show some of the main features of the tank. It also shows the main parts of what makes this the "Full Option Kit", namely the 2 motors, the DMD control unit (T03), the DMD multi function unit (MF01) and some lovely die-cast metal sprockets, which were a bit strewn about inside their box, as you can see on the picture. No worries though, they're all still intact.

Opening the main box, there's a whole lot of parts screaming at you, wanting to be put together and tested. The first thing you notice is the big slab of thick plastic right in the middle. It's the top cover of the lower hull, and it immediately gives you a good idea of the size of this thing. Seconds later, you notice something a bit to your right. 2 pre-linked pieces of tracks. At first look they look great, but soon enough you notice that they are indeed plastic. Picking one out of the box, it's a lot less heavy than you'd expect. So far, this is really the only thing that's a bit of a let down in this kit, but there's full metal replacement parts available from third party vendors.

Anyway, next thing you'll notice is the 2 rather large hunks of metal and gears. And look, there's even 2 motors there as well. A large part of the gears are metal, with a few of those under little stress being plastic. The fact that each track gets it's own motor should mean there's quite the power potential in this machine.

Then there's all the sprues with plastic body parts and detail parts. Now, I've built quite a few kits, even large ones, but these sprues and the parts they contain are incredibly big. The good thing about this, is that there's plenty detail, and that detail isn't microscopic. The bad thing, you need to be rather careful and accurate. Some of the large parts will likely be slightly bent out of shape, so you really need to pay attention when glueing stuff together. Apart from the large parts, there's also a medium sized box stashed away in between all the good stuff. This box holds the extra motors for turret rotation, barrel elevation, recoil etc. It also holds the muzzle flash of the main gun and the machine gun. Interestingly, the flash for the main gun says "danger, high voltage". The box also contains screws, bolts, nuts, washers and what not. Hundreds of them, ranging from very small to tiny. And then there's some basic tools like a little Allen wrench, a box wrench, special screwdrivers, springs, torsion bars and a whole lot of other things which will likely be used at some point or the other.

Next up, studying the manual. Yes, for this kit it's worth it going through the manual from start to finish before even thinking about screwing or glueing anything together ;)

Frame and lower hull

Having gone through the manual, and somewhat deciding a colour scheme, it's time to get started. The first thing you do, is put together 2 tension pulleys. A left and a right one. I'm guessing these are used to tighten or loosen the tracks once they come on. Quite an easy part, and a good start. The next step has you mount some die-cast parts to the inside of the duraluminium frame. At this point, I decided I didn't want to potentially mess up the die-cast parts, as they're important for the torsion bars which in the end make the suspension work. However, the bottom of the frame won't be covered by any other parts, so it was time to start painting.

I decided to go for the dark yellow/tan that all German tanks were painted starting February 1943. I was considering the very typical German dark grey, but I felt the dark yellow would bring out more of the details of the tank. Plus it allows for more interesting camouflage patterns. Anyway, I sprayed the frame first with Tamiya's metal primer, and then with the regular grey primer. Once that dried up, I used a Tamiya TS3 - Dark Yellow spraycan to spray on the actual colour. After 2 layers things looked nice and smooth. The next day I started mounting the die-cast torsion bar holders. There's 16 of them in total, each needing 2 tiny screws with threadlock on them. Now, I'd read about people saying the Tamiya threadlock tubes are a pain to use, but it took some firsthand experience to really believe it. You really do get either not enough or too much threadlock from the tube. After the first 3-4 screws, there were spots of threadlock all over the frame I had so carefully painted. Luckily, it's the bottom of the tank, and apart from that, it really should get some weathering in the end anyway, so no big problem there. Definately need to be careful with that threadlock on more visible parts though ;)

Once all that was done, it was time to start on the lower hull. Added some detail parts, but soon enough, it was time to start painting again. Large parts of the lower hull will be covered by the wheels and track, so if you want to paint there, you really need to do it before going on with the assembly. The painting here doesn't need to be very accurate, and there doesn't need to be any camouflage either. I do plan on adding a bit of a black wash over the whole thing, just to make it look a bit gritty and oily, and to really bring out all the molded detail.

In the picture you'll notice I didn't paint the entire lower hull. This is because I'll do all the visible parts of the body in one go, so there'll be as little colour difference as possible. Whether it really matters, I'm not sure. I still haven't decided if I'm going to stick to one colour (in which case any colour differences would be a problem), or add camouflage (in which case colour difference are the order of the day.) I've never done any camouflage painting though, and this is maybe a too expensive kit to try it on. In the last picture you can get somewhat of an idea of the size of the machine. That bottle of sprite is a standard 0.5 liter bottle.

Next up will be buying some more cans of paint (I've already used .1 liter of dark yellow so far), working up the courage to add a black wash and put on some weathering, working out a good mixture for Tamiya's flat base, clear coat and thinner, adding a clear coat over the lower parts of the hull, and then adding all the torsion bars and wheel axles.

Weathering and wheels

It was time to start weathering the lower body of the tank, the area behind and above the wheels. Now, you won't see much of it in the end, but that's what made it such a good place to start. I'm no good at weathering at all, but I do like the look that adding a black wash gives. Especially the panel lines, and small things like nuts and bolts starting to stand out looks good. A black wash is also not too difficult, unless of course, the wash decides it doesn't want to stick on the bodywork ;)

So, I let it rest for a while, and started preparing the wheels. The Tiger I has a LOT of wheels. 8 road wheels on each side, the driving wheel, and the track tension wheel. Each road wheel consists of multiple parts and need to be glued/screwed together. They'll also get a nice metal axle which will eventually attack them to the tank's suspension arms. So, 100ml of primer and about 200ml of dark yellow paint later, I had all the parts for the wheels in the color I wanted. Before doing anything else, it was decision time though. Camouflage or no camouflage... I found the dark yellow to be too bland by itself. I could've fixed it by maybe just adding a nice wash, but in the end, I decided I'd try camouflage. I've never done camouflage before, so it wasn't an easy decision to use a rather expensive model as a first try. Anyway, I had read a great article by Michael Fichtenmayer (http://www.fichtenfoo.com/) about camouflage, and he seemed to have an excellent method of adding great looking camouflage without having to study for 5 years first. I decided to try this, and I have to say, the result surprised me, since it actually looks good ;)

During the drying of the various layers of the paint on the wheels, I also went back to adding black washes to the lower hull. In the end, I managed to make it look reasonably okay, although nowhere near realistic. On the other hand, I'm not going for realism and insane detail, since part of the idea is to have the tank run outside, it's not a display model after all.

Other than the black wash, I also used some of Tamiya's weathering powders. Mostly silver on top of a few bolts and sprockets, a little mud here and there, mostly above where the track will eventually go, some dark almost black to simulate old grease, and some orange rust on parts where I thought things might be somewhat rusted. Most of those parts won't be visible in the end result, but again, it's a good area for testing.

You might notice what looks like stains on the wheels in the pictures below. These are there on purpose. I handbrushed those on and make them look like perhaps the wheel had been damaged there which caused them to weld the crack and repaint it. Or maybe the things had started rusting, and they decided they had some extra paint, so the painted over the rust. The end result looks strange in the pictures, but it looks better in life. Another nice thing about these stains, is that they'll add a bit of extra textures to the wheels when running a black wash over them, which coincedentally is what's coming up next...

Wheels and tracks

With the paint on the wheels dried up, I started weathering them, again with just a regular black wash. Due to the little dabs of paint I added earlier, the wheels got some darker spots here and there, and made them look used. I also picked up a Tamiya weathering stick, which is a sort of marker with a thick paste in it. This particular one resembled mud. I used it extensively on the roadwheels and the sprockets, so it looks like it's been driving through some mud. Using the stick was really easy, and the paste seems to stick quite well, it remains to be seen after how much running outside in the foliage, grass and sand it'll take before the mud falls off though ...

Assembling the wheels was a bit more problematic. Since I had opted to paint the parts while they were still on the sprue, all the surfaces where you usually glue the wheels had paint on them, and that needed to be stripped. In the end it took me about 5-6 hours of stripping paint, sanding and glueing to build a grand total of 16 road wheels. The good thing though, they look amazing on the tank.

Once the glue had dried well, I added the sprockets, roadwheels and track tension wheel. Ever since I first saw the box, I'd been wanting to drive the thing. My batteries were already fully charged, and since I was at the point where the tank had wheels, I decided to temporarily add the tracks, and all the electronics. After a bit of tuning and tensioning the track, the things was ready to go. The tank drives excellent, and behaves a lot like a real tank. Obsticles don't seem to be much of a problem, even with it's very smooth and slippery plastic tracks. I did notice however that the 2 motors make a rather annoying high pitches squeeling noise. I tried oiling them, but it didn't help. Now, in order to not here the gears while driving, you need to up the volume of the engine sound quite a bit, so much so that you won't hear the squeeling at all. Should there be any damage to the motors due to the sound, I'll just replace them, they're not expensive anyway.

On a sidenote, I'm getting closer and closer to finishing the tank, and I've already started wondering which one to buy next. I've pretty much decided I want to collect them, since even when they break down enough to not be able to run as an RC tank anymore, they make amazing display models.

Next up is the upper body, the turret, and of course the main feature, the gun ;)

Bodypainting

It's been a while since the last update, but the weather has been really crazy, and since the next step was painting the bodywork, turret and barrel, progress has been slow. Just how bad was the weather? Well, it's rained for about 4 weeks straight, it rained almost every day during July. When the rain finally stopped, there were 4 days of heavy winds which means spraypainting was out of the question.

However, patience is a virtue, and after a long time the weather got better, so it was time to head on out and spray the base colour on the larger parts of the tank. The entire body, turret and gun barrel are now painted dark yellow, which brings the amount of dark yellow paint used to 5 cans, or half a liter.

Was it worth it though? Hell yes, the thing looks so much better now than it did with the default dark grey plastic. I'm sure it'll look even better with some camouflage, as long as I don't mess that up ;)

Not much else to say, so here's a couple of before and after pictures.

Camouflage!

Again, been a while since the last update, I blame the weather once more.

It was time to camouflage the body, turret and barrel. Now, I thought doing the wheels was scary, but that was nothing compared to this. Screwing up would spell disaster (well, not really, I could've just stripped the paint and started over, but still ;))

So, I used the same technique to mask off the tank as I did the wheels. I masked of the edges of the camouflage pattern using Blu Tack, or at least, something similar to it. Blu Tack is a clay or putty like adhevise. You can mold it like clay, but it's sticky all over. You can roll a small sausage form it, and use it to make all sorts of smooth flowing lines. After using a LOT of Blu Tack, I used Tamiya's masking tape to mask off the large pieces between the Blu Tack. I also masked off several of the smaller things like the machine gun etc.

The next step was the actual painting. Using some more Tamiya spraycans (dark red-brown this time,) I sprayed the entire thing. Initially I thought I had messed up everything, since the dark red-brown is very dark, especially when it's still wet. I sprayed on 2 layers and let it dry for a few hours before taking off the masking. I did spray the paint a bit too thick here and there, but unfortunately I was rather pressed on time, since there were some nasty clouds coming my way. About 5 minutes after I sprayed on the 2nd layer it started raining. Luckily Tamiya's spraypaint dries quick, so even after 5 minutes it was possible to carry everything inside.

So, after some hours the big moment arrived. I have to say, I was scared to death and almost certain I messed up the camouflage. But I figured what the heck, if it really is messed up, I'll repaint it. Repainting however isn't necesarry, since it ending up looking amazing ;) The 2 colours offset each other real nice, so the tank is both light and dark at the same time. It definately adds an entire new dimension to the thing, and I'm certainly glad I went for the camouflage pattern. There are a couple of problem spots where I sprayed the paint to thick, but those aren't that bad, and easy to fix if I would want to.

Of course after everything was dry I had to do a quick test assembly to see how it looked with the turret mounted. I haven't added the wheels yet, since I still need to weather some parts that will be inaccesible once the wheels are on.

So this time, a few more pictures than usual, since this is sort of the biggest step in the building process. Enjoy!