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1:16 Tiger I tank

The name of the blog may be Little Tanks & Tiny People, but this is an absolute beast! It’s a 1:16 scale replica of the iconic Tiger tank or, to give it its full title, the Panzerkampfwagen VI Ausführung E Tiger I. And it is a massive 53 cm long. The kit is made by Hobby Boss and it is basically an RC tank kit with the RC components removed. The number of parts is therefore fairly small, but there is still plenty of detail for painting. 

I did a couple of conversions on this tank. The Hobby Boss kit comes with two metal combs. It is suggested that if you want a Zimmerit coat on your Tiger, you apply putty to the surfaces and then use the combs to texture it. After some experimentation I quickly learned that this was a sure way to ruin a perfectly nice model. I therefore splurged out on the Atak Zimmerit ZM-1603 kit, which isn't cheap but is of very high quality and definitely worth the price. The ZM-1603 kit is advertised to fit Tamiya models, but it also fits the Hobby Boss kit very well. It comes as several thin plastic sheets that you cut the panels out off using ordinary scissors. Some parts like the gun mantlet are completely newly sculpted pieces. Several hours and a tube of superglue later I had lost most of my fingerprints, but gained a lovely Zimmerit look! 

On a side note, Zimmerit was a textured coating applied to German tanks to prevent magnetically attached anti-tank mines from sticking. The coating worked very well, but as no country apart from Germany used magnetically attached mines it was fairly pointless... Applying the Zimmerit coat added several days to the production time of a vehicle, so its use was discontinued later on in the war. 

Another little conversion was the addition of two sets of track links on the glacis and a rack with spare track links on the lower frontal plate. I bought the latter on Ebay and I think it may have come from a Heng Long RC Tiger tank. Everything was then painted using acrylics and dirt was applied to the tracks and lower body using a mixture of used coffee grounds, wood glue and brown acrylic paint. The thee-tone angular camouflage mimics that used by SS Panzerabteilung 102 in Normandy in June-July 1944. The kit comes with decals, but I don't like the glossy look of those and chose to paint the balkenkreuz and tank identification number by hand.

Tiger Tank

Tiger Tank

Tiger Tank

Tiger Tank

Tiger Tank

Tiger Tank

Tiger Tank

Tiger Tank

Tiger Tank

Tiger Tank

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