Tale of Three Tigers

Now to work on the 3 production ( Henschel ) turrets . Back in my June 30 post I showed the almost complete #1 turret . Since then I have added all the little bits and pieces and the spare track on the sides . Warlord gives you 8 sections of spare track , ( part #39) , but they screwed up . There are 2 different style of track pieces , Tiger tracks were handed , meaning a left track and a right track  but both  left and right are  numbered the same . So get out your favorite reference book and check out some Tiger II photos . So with that sorted , I needed to make some track hangers for the turret side as I used a couple of pieces as stowage on #13 .  I made the hook from Plastruct C  , cutting off on leg of the C . You could also make it from thin metal or brass strip , or even larger size office staples , but I like to work with plastic .

The hooks and lower mounts for the spare track are off set so make sure to check your references carefully

So one production turret down , on to #2 . With this one I wanted to portray a tank from the 505 Heavy Tank company , those Tigers with the neat looking knight on horseback markings on the turret sides . Warlord gives you 3 options of that decal , with the horse blanket in red , yellow , or green . It’s  supposed that the color of the blanket stands for the company , red – 1 , yellow 2 , etc . But color photos of the unit show a number the same  company tanks with different colors  ( interesting discussion on Missing Lynx )  , so again , I picked another unit  the experts still have questions about  .

While the 505 tanks had zimmerit , they removed a large patch on the turret side on which to paint their knight . So , I got out my collection of X Acto chisel blades and went to work . I cut a template of roughly the size of the decal , traced around it on the turret side and got cutting . I then lightly sanded the area and gave it a coat of Tamiya liquid glue to soften / smooth out some of the chisel marks . When dry I will add a thin layer of putty / liquid green stuff if needed