I’m in the middle of restoring a “glue bomb” Tamiya 1/35 RC King tiger(based off of their 35164 King Tiger kit). I wanted to build it this time with zimmerit. Since I’m new to the art of applying zimmerit, I bought an Eduard photo etched zim set. It’s not a bad set for the most part, but the ball mounted MG just doesn’t look good with all of the seams.
The other options for zimmerit I was looking at was either a Cavalier resin zim set or applying it myself with putty and a zimmert roller(from either lion roar or AFV club). A premade zimmerit set would be ideal, since I don’t want to risk messing up the kit with a bad zimmerit job, but I’ve read that many of the resin sets don’t really fit well and require work on the zimmerit anyway.
I’m really confused which direction to go. Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated.
Cavalier is, in my opinion, an easy option at this point. Apply it with Elmer’s glue. Once in place, lock it in with super glue. The PE stuff sucks because of seams like you see at the MG ball – simply ridiculous.
Another option later is that DML is making several kits with zimmerit pre-molded.
Don’t be put off by Eduard Zim. I really like it. In fact, here is a Panther, I have in the works, using Eduard Zim.
What you do is, take putty or super glue, to fill in those seems. You can then, make impressions, in the Zim and then paint & weather. You’ll never know, those were there.
It’s hard to get PE Zim, pre manufactured, that can lay the perfect way around the MG housing.
Is this what you are talking about? If so, no worries.
Ya know, honestly–if you’re restoring an admitted “glue bomb”, use this opportunity to learn how to do your own zimmerit out of Squadron putty and either a mini-saw blade or the custom tools designed by…uh…yeah, that company. They look like mini saw blades anyway.
It’s a great skill to learn, and you might as well learn it on a “junky” model first.
This appears to the most viable operation considering the existing state of the model. In the future, if you choose AM, Atak or Cavalier are the best. I prefer Cavalier, because it’s about 1/3 - 1/2 cheaper.
