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This is a straightforward kit build of the Tamiya RC series 1/16th scale King Tiger. I've already built a few of these including the Panzer iV, Tiger 1 and a few Leopards. The last were heavily modified for a commission and included cameras, new electronics, gearboxes and running gear. The others are more for the fun with a few mates in the back garden than serious models. The Kind Tiger has ben kicking around the bench for a while and I decided I needed some space for a couple of other projects so time to get it finished. Although there's little modelling involved I decided to post it hear for the paint work and weathering. The hull underside has been waiting around for a while: Top half of the hull: Has a bit to go yet with the tri-tonal camouflage pattern. I've been using panzer putty to mask off areas prior to spraying. It doesn't have to be too accurate as in real life it was done by two blokes with spray guns, one with brown and the other with green starting from opposite sides and soaring over the basic sand colour. While that's taking shape time to work on some of the tools: Not yet completed. On the kit parts there is no grain for the wood so I tried to recreate that with paint rather than using a scriber, which is probably what I should have done. I was reasonably happy with the way the metal parts turned out. The axe, shovel and extinguisher need a bit of work yet.

Finally got round to getting putting some of this stuff together. Hardly spectacular but I got started on the engine trailer. Rebuilt part of the supporting legs. The Tamiya parts fitted alright but not without leaving large irregular gaps. I hope the rest won't be too much like this. There are no decals for the trailer. There should be a bunch of writing along the flats of the metal horizontals with max weights etc. I'll make my own but need to hunt around for a few pictures.

A spot of wet chemical etching or laser ablation might do the job. The pitch and hole size at 500 microns makes it a bit tricky but not impossible for the kitchen table (the wet etch part anyway). Know anybody locally in the electronics business?

Just had a chance to catch up on your recovery efforts. That's top class work after your earlier trials. Good way to start 2017. We'll have to get used to the new trademark table cover.

Thanks guys. I'm going to have a think about the next one. Have to do some of the travelling thing for my lords and masters with plenty time for a ponder. I know it won't be the Meng Abrams. I'll let that collect some dust in the stash for a bit and have a try at something else when I get back.

Right, that's it. I'm calling this one done. Wasn't quite the result I was looking for but it will do. Repaired the damaged screen, gave up on the gunner and will stick with a commander only. Knocked the exhaust deflector of while working on the paintwork and could not get the thing glued back on so decided to hang it from the bin railings which is what often happens. Went over the pigment disaster by dry brushing with the base colour lightened with some white. Seems to have helped. Here's the end result. More hires pictures can be found on my Flickr site at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/113106574@N02/albums/72157660966170149

I'm afraid so. I seem to have made meal of this one. Time for some basic repairs to the paint work and see if I can still get the bleached look that the paint layer has once its been in the sun. I want to crack on with an F-16 next but that will be a long term project. I'm being lured to some of the Russian kit that's appearing on the market. I've seen quite a bit of it on travels and it would be interesting to give to a try.

This hasn't been going well. I managed to fit the GPMG by remaking part of the mount and repairing the parts I broke while using the heat gun. I then though I might be on a finish and added some pigment to some of the surfaces. Left it overnight and found this the next day. I'm still not sure what I was thinking about when I wrecked the paint job. Tried to get the pigment off by vigorous scrubbing with cotton buds, firstly soaked in water and then in airbrush cleaner. Still couldn't remove all of it so decided that a wash over the top might be good idea. The thing now looks like its been sprayed with fake tan. Frustrated with that, I turned my attention to the little guys. Could I get them to fit their positions in the turret? I don't think so. The arms have been chopped in a few places but no luck, or only with a pose that would be completely unnatural. The commander fits just but sticks out too far. Fitting the gunner was just impossible and I ended up breaking the GPMG. I'll repair the GPMG, leave out the gunner and call it a day. Maybe I can use him in Humvee turret or something. He also needs a clean up to remove some of the pigment.

I'd say you got the dusting on the tyre just right. I wouldn't overdo it. Nice line up of panzers and Big Mo looks impressive.

I'm with you on that. For the Brits amongst us its like watching something from the old Blue Peter shows...."and here's one I made earlier". I reckon that's a stopwatch in the corner of some of the pics. I'm looking forward to the finished result.

Spent some time last night trying to fix my GPMG problem. Well, first off was to correct the mong error of trying to feed the belt into a random hole on the side of the gun mount created by Tamiya for their part. I'm a bit worried that I looked at that a few times and didn't spot the blunder until I was thinking about it while doing something else. Putting things in the correct place helped a bit but not completely. Next I thought about bending the screen a little by the gentle application of heat. That didn't work too well and the mount broke. However now that its broken I may have more opportunities to correct things. Cracking idea. I had a look at the Meng part and thought about casting. It's a different design so I'd have to adjust the complete mount. The Meng detail is just better. I was also tempted by LiveResin's offerings but at the end decided to see if I can't make the best of a bad job with what I've got.

It hasn't been a good week so thought I'd relax and unwind with Abrams. Tamiya had other ideas. Here's the problem: On the RHS is the 7.62 ammo box Tamiya provided for the gunners M240. On the LHS is the size it should be as provided by Eduard. No problem here and it looks a lot better than the Tamiya lump of plastic. Right, lets mount it on the panzer and %$#^ it! it doesn't fit. The red circle shows the problem area. The angle on the support for the armoured window isn't quite right so Tamiya thought, fnek it we'll just made the ammo box and tray smaller so that it will fit. Not sure what the solution is yet but I'm fed up with it and Meng version is calling out from the top of the stash. I'm certainly not putting the Tamiya lump of plastic back in place of the Eduard effort.

That's a depressingly impressive build speed. My efforts took forever, never the less I enjoyed the build and Meng's quality. I'll be interested to see how this one turns out. If you don't mind I'll pull up a chair.

Thanks for the tip on the helmets. I hadn't looked for any threads on them yet. Good to know.

The postman turned up with a package today. Great, the front office has arrived along with metallic AOA probes and pitot. The moulding on the instrument panels and seat look clean but by heck they're small. Anyone have a 1/16th viper kit? Right, time to get started. I've started removing the ejector pin marks on the engine dolly.

I don't blame you for sitting on them, their like unicorn poo. Thanks for the advice. I was planning on building the different modules and then making sure it all fitted prior to final assembly. I've been bitten once too often by parts that look like they fitted individually but when combined.

Secondary armament completed, Now the little guys. Cupola structure complete. And then I went to my first model show last weekend...... ......and kept seeing the Meng kit on display and finally couldn't resist. It was that or drop a bundle on a pile of other stuff. Had a look in the box and it looks good.

Have filled up the extra holes and now working on finishing the brass for the secondary armament along with the commander's cupola. Had a picture but something seems to have changed regarding photo insertion. I suspect photobucket may be to blame. It has become increasingly more irritating with its endless popups. (I'm too cheap to pay the couple of dollars for add free.) I'll look into it later and see if maybe Flickr would be a better option. The addition of the extra armour to the commander's cupola hasn't been easy. The extra armour on the RHS of the cupola doesn't fit. Trimming isn't really an option as there simply isn't anything to trim and bending with a bit of heat isn't really an option. It should fit the circumference of the cupola ring which it does but the rest is out of place. The lower holes have to match up with the periscopes but then the parts of the machine gun mount are in the way with no wiggle room. I've managed to get a reasonable fit but I'm not entirely happy with it. I sometimes wonder if there's somebody at Tamiya that does this intentionally just to screw around with folks. I had similar with one of their large scale Ferraris and had to re-engineer most of the kit. 3 hours later: Result, pictures again.

Thanks Mike. I have markings in mind but will leave that for the time being until I see how my modelling skills fare. Hopefully I'll hit it first time without having to add another to the stash. Found out the name of the guy that does the wolfpack stuff so I'll be dropping him a note for a HTS and Sniper pods, see if I can "Weasel" a set out of him. I think he nailed it with the underside. I'd try to have the topside a little less shiny. Problem with HG is that its appearance changes not only with angle of view but over time as the airframe picks up general grot and dust. Airframe in the hanger will tend just to look grey, roll it outside with the sun on it and it will show the HG patina. I think I'll try the recipe in the link but then coat it with a combination of matt and gloss varnish (with matt being predominant).

This one has been quietly marinating in the stash for a while. A couple of weeks ago I splashed out on some extra parts and the package arrived at the weekend. Brilliant! Or so I thought. So, apart from Tamiya's viper I added Aires' tail pipe, wheel bays and weighted wheels along with Eduard brass. I quick search of the delivery box revealed that I was missing the Aires front office, fog it! I'd forgotten to add it to the order list. Another order required along with postage costs. So first off this is what Big Ed delivers: Seven packages containing masks for the canopy, a stencil set, "Remove before flight" tags, brass for the bang seat and cockpit which looks reasonably good along with brass for the exterior and a ladder. A lot of the external brass is for the air brakes and I'll probably have these closed so I don't expect I'll be using that. Price wise it made more sense to buy the Big Ed package rather than just the elements I wanted. Now the contents of the big box. Apologies for the photo quality. Normally I'd use my SLR but had a bad day with an Abrams so used the camera on the iPad. Not much to say about these two other than the parts are all cleanly moulded. I'd have liked a bit more definition in the panel lines but I'll see about that later. Decal set: Not sure how many of these I'll use. The contents of a box within a box. Nice to see that there are two canopies; Tinted and clear. As some aircraft had a mix of front and rear sections this is a nice addition. Nose cone is here as well however I think I'll replace the pressure vanes with metal ones. There was also an empty plastic bag. Not sure if it was meant to contain anything. Tail fin and engine bay. The pressure sensor on the tail leading edge looks a tad fragile as do the static dischargers on another sprue. Metal me thinks. Bang seat and 2 pilots. I might convert one of the helmets to JHMCS version after I've drilled out on of the heads. The ladder looks terrible but maybe I'm being over critical. Compared to the quality of the rest of the parts it looks like a 5min after thought. The plan is to try to paint the Have Glass finish. I'm not quite sure how I'm going to tackle that yet and obtain the patina required. I also wanted to add a Sniper pod in addition to the 213 Harm targeting pod. Additionally the Harm pod has to move over to the LHS leaving space for the AN/AAQ-33 Sniper pod. Seems the only people who manufacture an after market pod set are an outfit called Wolfpack however they seem to have stopped production of these parts. If anybody has a set somewhere that they'd like to convert into cash I'd be interested. The plan is to build a desktop display model with the engine alongside. It also means opening up some of the panels normally found open when the aircraft is parked and building some of the detail behind them. But before I start all that its back to ordering a few more parts.

Thanks Francis, unfortunately this was the weekend of screw ups. Part of the turret TUSK has been added but the forward section hasn't. The f#%%! launcher is in the way. I was focussed on the detail of a launcher I had in some photos and failed to realised that it was for an M1A2 without TUSK. The version for TUSK has a slightly different form and allows the addition off the armour and yes, sure enough they were in the box. I fitted the wrong ones and in the manner of "right, that won't be coming off". I've decided to fill the extra holes and leave the plates off. I've enough pictures of the Abrams in Iraq in varying states of undress so it shouldn't look out of place. Still annoyed and it becomes more tempting to pick up the Meng kit. I see from the picture I've also knocked off the securing pin for the tow cable while mucking around. It should be lying on the bench somewhere.

Been out for a while and now have some time to pick up the Abrams again. Making slow progress. Basic turret and bins completed, hull finished. Time to make a push for the finish.

Nice job. Might try one myself to add to my Cougar.

On the Rust-oleum question I managed to pick up some locally which was a surprise. I had a practice on some gash plastic and the results were mixed. I had acquired a tin of desert sand and another of pebble dash. The pebble dash was much too varied in texture however will make an excellent basis in a diorama and save a lot of time creating a textured base. I thought the desert sand would be closer to the results that Agent G had on his Abrams. Although it says desert sand on the tin its more like desert dust. Thought I may not have shaken the can sufficiently so went at it like a demented baboon for a good ten minutes but still the result was rather dusty. I'll try layering up a few coatings later and see if that helps the result.

Looks like my soldering technique needs improving somewhat. This was supposed to be an ammo box but turned out to be burnt fingers, bad language and a mess of brass and solder. Eventually it did clean up (two green boxes on top of turret in next photo) and I managed to get hold of a smaller battery powered soldering iron which works rather well for the smaller work. Here's work on the turret with most for the basic brass fitted and a bit of pre-shading. The Tamiya tow cables looked really bad so I decided to make my own and use the Eduard brass for fixing them to the turret. The grenade launchers have been drilled out. Spent a lot of time trying to get the colours right on the optics. As they are multilayer coatings this means that they appear to change colour when the angle of view changes, red when face on and blue from an angle. The results weren't great so its just going to have to be red.