Erik's in box review of Tamiya's Jagdtiger

Modeling Subjects Armor
1

Hey everyone. I bought Tamiya’s new Jagdtiger in Great Model’s 50% sale last week. I figured I would write an in box review on it for everyone. My goal is to show what you get with this kit and my impressions of it.

First off, the box for this kit is long. It’s about the size of the Maus and E100 boxes I have in my stash. I found it quite surprising. I can’t find a place for it in my stash. Anyway, The box is of usual Tamiya quality in terms of art and explanation of what’s in the kit. When you open the box you should see something like this.

It’s jam backed with goodies. Kit contents goes something like this:

Marking guide for several tanks. It even has a description of where the tank fought and how it met it’s demise.

A color sheet of reference pictures. In this case they are of the Jagdtiger at Aberdeen, which is also depicted on the box art.

The normal high quality Tamiya direction sheet.

PE fret and decals.

Two options for tracks. It comes with rubber band style, and link and length style. As you’ll see in the pics, the link and length tracks look better.

The rubber band

Link and length

Look for the second installment later tonight. I’ll cover all the sprues then.

Erik

2

I received this kit for Christmas and I absolutely loved it

3

Does it have a turned metal barrel as some of other recent Tamiya releases have?

4

Part 2

This section will be going over the different sprues.

First up is the upper hull.

The molding and detail are crisp as we have come to expect from modern Tamiya kits. I test fit thew upper and lower hulls and they fit great.

Molded on lower hull detail.

The D sprue

The D sprue contains parts for the main gun, interior floor, the half crew figures and pioneer tools.

The cast detail of the mantlet look great and is accurate when compared to real photos.

The driver and commander.

Some modlers may be put off by the fact that the gun barrel is molded as two halves.

A sprue (x2)

A sprue contains the suppension arms, road wheels, idler wheel, drive sprockets, and exhaust. It appears that one set of wheels has seperate faces. I’m not sure why this is. You can see what I’m talking about in the picture below.

Road wheel detail.

Drive sprocket detail.

C sprue

This sprue contains all the hull parts like the roof, side skirts etc. Unfortunantly, the side skirts are molded as one section. I’m sure there will be a PE set to replace them.

Roof detail

B sprue (x2)

The last sprue contains the link and length tracks. To me, these tracks seem to be much more detailed then the rubber band tracks also supplied in the kit. When I build mine I will probably go with these.

My overall impression of this kit is very positive. The only faults I can find are the two piece gun barrel and the one piece fenders. The kit keeps with the Tamiya tradition of simple, but detailed kits.I’m not sure when I build the Jagdtiger, buit I’ll be sure to post a build log. I hope someone here found this useful. Thanks for looking.

Erik

5

I would have been all over this if I hadn’t already gotten the Dragon upgraded kit.

Still nice to see what’s in the box. Pretty detailed color instructions.

6

Geist,

Thanks for posting the review. One other thing I notice is knock-out marks on the LnL tracks. Guess it just needs some mud and grass! I’ll be looking for this kit at my LHS.

Jeff