Thanks for creating the badge! I’m not a badge person (I only host the towed gun badge for those guys who want it – I’ll be removing it from my sig file soon guys, so grab it while you can!), but I appreciate your doing it – just one more contribution you’ve made to the build.
I actually didn’t lose any pieces but one – one of those pins that holds the mantlet in. It went in too far, I pulled it out with tweezers, and it flew onto the rug. The light grey rug.
I ended up plugging the hole with a bit of sprue, levelling it off, and then using the little plug thing at the back of the turret (for the storage bin) as a replacement for the external part of the pin. It looks fine.
Say, this might be a good place to discuss 1/72nd scale Tiger I kit quality.
The Dragon zimmerit kit isn’t bad, and the fit is generally pretty good. I found the tools molded onto the hull roof to be a blessinng, needless to say!
Here are the exceptions.
The attachment of the steel and the plastic parts of the tow cables was a bit problematic, as the steel parts are a bit too thick to join correctly with the plastic pieces. They do look great though.
The biggest problem was that the rear idler did not fit correctly into the gap in the last roadwheel. I filed the inner edge of that roadwheel down to be paper thin, and that helped a bit, but the last roadwheel buckles out still. It’s a real fit problem.
I didn’t have any problems with the fit of the turret roof, strangely enough.
The rubber treads are, let’s face it, terrible. They were produced for the motorized Tigers and they need to go on the static models.
Huge accuracy problem – no spare links! Are they kidding? These Tigers all had links on the vulnerable turret sides, and many had links of the lower hull front and even on the upper hull front too. But the turret links are really a must. Shame on them for not providing them.
Ok, that said, the kit is a good build-up, but I don’t think it’s a kit for beginners, like Cookie Sewell’s review claimed. You’ve got to drill holes out, and some of the little pieces are quite hard to get off the sprue – like the light and the hull MG. Working with the steel cables would be tough for a new modeler too.
The zimmerit is a big plus. When I put the whitewash on, and then scrub it off, the whitewash will stay in the zimmerit recesses, just like on the real tanks. Cool.
At this point, though, I really wish I’d built a Tunisian tiger using Revell and just done the typical painting, washing and weathering. I’m a little disappointed that I bit off more than I could chew, and as a result I didn’t really finish. I could have built the diorama as a long-term project, and built a single Tiger as a mini-display item. Live and learn: Set realistic goals.