Our old pal Patrick is staying over with us today/tonight, which is nice. He and I have both suffered from serious depression in recent times. Patrick longer and poss’ deeper into the blackness than me, to be fair.
So it’s nice that we both feel sufficiently well we can socialise with each other! In person, that is. We’ve been in touch via Zoom. Teresa served up the second instalment of her delicious winter stew, with dumplings. And we had apple pie and custard for dessert. Lovely!
We watched The Young Pitt, a 1942 wartime propaganda film, starring Robert Donat, who we know better for his role in The 39 Steps. Here he plays both Pitt the Younger, and his own father, Lord Chatham! I really enjoyed the movie, despite its obvious patriotic chest-thumping, perhaps mainly ‘cause I’m a nut for anything pertaining to the Napoleonic era?
But to the model: my abandoned and largely stripped Tiger I. Today I zimm’ed the two sides of the hull. This was a proper arse-ache, having to work around all the little skirt/mudguard mounting doodads.
I also assembled the gun and turret. The tank I’m building has no rear-turret storage bin. So I left that out. More trickily, however, this kit has spare tracks built in to the turret sides! I had to cut these out and then fabricate curved sheets to fill the gaps (see pics below).
The observant might also spot that the commander’s cupola hatch is open. This was another wee job that entailed much time and effort. As the original part was one piece, I had to carefully cut out the hatch, add some internal detail, and then re-mount it, but in an open position.
This is all obviously a step or three back from the pictures at the top of this post. Those show the turret fully de-tracked, rebuilt, with zimmerit and the open command hatch added.
Another little area of detail I quite enjoyed fabricating was the underside of the commander’s hatch. The kit part was bare underneath. I needed to add a reinforcing ring, and the three handles. Making the latter being a fun challenge.
Cutting out the commander’s hatch inevitably damaged the inner portion of the outer ring, a little, as can be seen in the above pic. I might try to restore that somehow? And, somewhat obviously, my scratch-built detailing of the underside of the hatch is perhaps both coarse, and rather chunkily oversized.
Sometimes kits like this have certain oddities of design. For example, on – or rather in – the commander’s cupola, vision blocks are included. Yet if you were to assemble the kit as per the instructions, you’d never see these details!
And yet there’s no other internal turret detail. Some kits would include the internal breech-block end of the main armament. Not so here, alas.
