Construction report Tiger II, part 1

Model and report by: Andreas Tupy
Model Kit: Tamiya
Accesoiries: ABER-PE parts for Tiger II
Translation from German: G. Schachinger

The history of the Tiger II:

Originally planned as a further stage of development from its elder "brother" Tiger I, the Tiger II or Tiger B distinguished a lot from its predecessor. (By the way: the nick name "King Tiger" was given to him by the Allies.)
Its turret should host the new 88 mm KwK (main gun ) 43 L/71, which was the improved gun of the Tiger I and furthermore provide more armoured protection. To manage this, the hull had to be enlarged and the armour plates were arranged in slight angles. Thus this tank was much harder to knock out, than any other German vehicle so far.
The new main gun could penetrate 280 mm armour at a distance of up to 1 km. It was the most powerful weapon of this time! A major disadvantage was the weak engine of the Tiger II . Which cost a lot of losses due to stuck vehicles. The famous constructor, Prof. PORSCHE did issue another turret-concept, but only 50 items were used for the first fielded HENSCHEL hulls (see picture).

This version unfortunately had an unfavorable design that caused incoming projectiles to be "caught" between the turret and the hull roof and resulted in penetrating the latter because of its weak armour. Therefore it was replaced by Henschels version with straight front armour. Similar to the Tiger I the "King Tiger" gained legendary fame. It could knock out every allied tank and didn´t need to fear any of them, except the enormous Russian JS II and JS III. It was the pride of German armoured troops!

The Tamiya kit:

The kit comes in the usual dark yellow Polystyrol plastic moulds and has no major mistakes. If one likes, it can be build straight out of the box. But as you might know my passion, I wanted to have it as similar to the original as possible! Therefore I bought the precise and value for money PE-parts of ABER Company for my kit.

To make it clear from the very start: to get historical proper results, when using the PE-parts, one has to do accurate research, because otherwise one could mix up the early or late versions during the construction! As mine should depict a mixed version, which was the Tiger II numbered "332", I had to overcome the usual problems, like finding enough original pictures and sketches. If our model-God allows, one can also make out some of the few flaws of the kit, like missing electric wiring of the head light or the fuel air vent hose at the rear end.

Using the ABER-PE parts:

I started with the running gear, the wheels and the idler wheels. Soon one has to fix the first PE parts onto the upper hull: the little lift-hooks near the air vent intakes and near the drivers and machine gunners hatches, which were omitted by Tamiya. Then it was the turn for all parts of the fire extinguisher and the bolt cutter mount. That was a major challenge for me as it took me more than 2 hours to fix these things!

The meshes on top of the air vent intakes were comparable sheer pleasure. That was followed by the mounts for the hammer and the axe. I added the electric wiring for the head light with copper wire and the fuel air vent hose. This was also very hard to fix, because the mounts for it are not more than 1 mm long and 0,4 mm wide. Another mount, namely that of the shovel consists of not less than 10 pieces!

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Click on the thumbnails to enlarge. Pictures open in new window.

First construction pictures

Another torture was to make the winch, as ABER "wanted" me to use all of the PE parts for this item, which I refused and only exchanged the badly sculpted main body. Further little pieces of the PE-set are to be added at the rear end of the hull, but then one can "marry" the upper and lower hull finally.

The next stage was much desired, as it let me somewhat recover from the previous work, as the towing cable mounts and the track assembly cable mounts are not so hard to do. Only the removing of the moulded-on mounts on the cables is a little bit awkward and demands focused attention to avoid broken parts. The side skirts and their respective bolts caused no problems.

Now most of the work had been done (I stopped counting at about piece number 60, neglecting all the nuts, which I don’t want to think of any more…), except of the turret-assembly. The improvements with the commander’s cupola are the vision blocks, which should be movable, but as I was already exhausted after the previous challenges, I skipped this extra work as well as showing the close combat aperture open. A little steel pin for the cupola on the other hand was an easy pray as was the fixing handle at the gunners´ hatch interior.

So far all the work could have been finished, if I hadn´t wanted to use the extraordinary well done single-track links from the Fiulmodell Company. This cost me another day of assembling. But I warmly recommend using it, because of the good quality, which gives the tank extra accuracy!

Part 2, painting will follow!

© Tupy 2002

About the modeller: My name is Andreas Tupy. I was born in Vienna on 7th of Nov. 1977. My profession is plumber. After getting a present of an airplane-kit at the age of 5 years, I only lost interest in the modelling passion, because of other circumstances. But since I happened to buy a "King Tiger" model a year ago it "stroke" me again: since then I am dealing very intensive with modelling, spending most of the time for researching. I am mainly interested in German armour of WW II.

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