Alex's King Tiger

Thanks. The pine boughs are Hudson & Allen Studios. I bought them back in '94-95 over at HobbyTown USA in Augusta Georgia. I've never used them on anything, but the KT seemed a good testbed. The only gripe I have is they've curled a bit from sitting so long. I had to spray them with some alcohol (per the instructions) and then fluffed them up a bit.

So on with the build....

The crew...I was looking to get all fancy, but shifted to simplicity at the end. The commander is based on a figure I had in the figures spares box. I think it's an old Dragon figure. The arms are a mix and it's suppose to look like he's checking his watch.

The loader is mostly made from one of the Meng kit supplied figures. It's original posture was seated stiffly upright...legs together. He's pointing at something over to his right...maybe it's Bigfoot or something. I spread his legs a bit to uncrush his man-parts...posed him slumped forward a bit. The arms are from the spares and support that slumped posture. I dressed up his tunic top by adding thinned putty to the bottom. This was to make it look baggier and a bit more ragged.

Here's the full crew...or at least the ones that will be seen. The driver is a torso mounted on a length of tubing. The radioman.hull gunner is an Academy Tiger 1 figure...I think. It's pretty crude, a tad undersized, and has a bit of a feminine look to him. I was actually going to use this for a female panzer crewperson but I sort of lost interest in that project. Anyway, the paint was pretty simple, especially with driver and hullgunner. All you'll see of them is the tops of their shoulders and heads.

Anyway, the figures were mounted. Whatever bits that needed adding were added. I didn't give it a hull MG. That goes with the worn-out tank image. Same for the antenna. I did want to add some non-pen hits but I really was worried about over-doing it. Oh...and no markings. The reason for that, I might be using this for a what-if/hypothetical German/Nazi civil war after Hitler's assassination. I'd probably make it a non-Nazi vehicle and have it fly the old Imperial German Insignia.

So there she is. She turned out okay...I'll give her that. I had some issues and I really expected more out of Meng on this one. I'm glad it's done and I probably will use it for something. For the price, if I had to buy another late KT, I'd probably kick in a few more bucks for the Academy kit or the venerable Tamiya kit. And for a zimm version I'd go Hobby Boss just because I've already built the Dragon kit. And to be fair to Meng, the full interior version may be a nice kit.