Taigen King Tiger with early turret AKA PORSCHE Turret WTB

[Vintage Racer]

Been a minute, been working on this a little bit at a time and tonight I attached the first section of turret zimmerit. It's looking pretty good and it fits really nice after it's trimmed correctly. I do the final fit with around 200° f water and it just melts in like butter. It will contour around a lot of curves. Just have to take your time and don't get crazy impatient.

I chose not to go with that number 12 vehicle from the Normandy campaign. If you look closely at the photos it doesn't have the base ring at the turret to contour in the early production turret with the hull, and eliminate the trap shot from the sides or front. It's just weird looking.



Instead I'm going to model vehicle 114, which also fought in Normandy. It has the normal large main gun and just standard camouflage. I don't prefer to model any kind of strange or one-off vehicles which #12 what that tank was. I'm a really big fan of this Atak Zimmerit.

[Vintage Racer]

You can find photos of number 114. I attached a couple, one of the actual vehicle and one of an artist concept.

I work pretty hard at not making these camouflage jobs perfect. To try to feel how awful the guy doing the work had to feel. I've read that most of the time they didn't have the proper materials, reducer or hardener. They thinned the pigment with whatever they could find, so that had to be awful. They were painted in the worst conditions by people that probably weren't very happy to be there. I always think about how miserable they must have been while they were doing the work. Having done a lot of paint work myself on vehicles I can't imagine what it had to be like a paint outside in about any condition you can imagine. Day and night. Then you're done painting, they just throw a bunch of brush/vegetation on top of it. Then of course I might be wrong. They might have loved standing out in the cold at night painting. Just so the vehicle can get blown to hell... I've seen only one original paint German World War II vehicle in my life, it was at the Patton museum, a Stug 3. It looked terrible. Like it was unbelievably bad. Nothing like any picture you ever see or artist concept or box art. It was terrible. So I try to find a happy medium.

[Vintage Racer]

I don't know what motivated me, I went ahead and put the other side on tonight, you can clearly see here the preformed shape after heating with hot water, I soak the paper towel in the 200° water and lay it down on the Zimmerit while it's in position. It takes the shape of the item you're trying to make it conform to pretty quick. Make sure everything's dry, mix up your epoxy, you don't need much because you're putting it on thin. I don't mix it hot but I probably use more than I need initially and then scrape off what might be extra. I keep an isopropyl alcohol soaked towel nearby to clean off any extra epoxy that oozes out as I'm working out the air bubbles between the Zimmerit and the hull or in this case the turret. I keep a little space heater running on the workbench to warm it up so the epoxy sets quicker, you can use 15 if it's in a weird area and it might take a little extra to get it to conform but these were easy. 5 minutes was enough.

Once the epoxy has set, just trim off the extra. There will be extra. The parts are designed to be a little larger than the area you're covering. I used number 25 blade medical scalpel which is one of my favorite tools. Dragging across the top and it just comes right off. Trim it down to the existing edge of the turret.

[quitcherbitchen]

very nice work. Nice tip about the preheat.

[Vintage Racer]

very nice work. Nice tip about the preheat.

Thanks, the instruction included with the sets are very good, clear and concise. I didn't come up with it by any means. Its in the instruction. I was skeptical at first, but upon trying the technique, the resin parts give up immediately with the hot water. Only thing I would add is when you sand the parts out of the sheet, go slow and use just a bit of Dawn. Do the sanding wet. Add the Dawn to keep the paper from catching, and use one direction stroke, away from you. Otherwise it will bind and fold when it catches. It happened to me once, but not bad enough that the part was ruined.

Atak has resumed shipping to the USA. I bought mine off eBay, from Australia. Crazy.

https://atakmodel.istore.pl/

[Vintage Racer]

Colorized this with GROK, kinda cool. The camo is far from how its modeled most of the time. I specified to use color film from 1944 when the AI did the conversion. If I remember correctly there are two Brit POWs in the shot. You can see them easily by the uniforms.