RC Tank Warfare community hobby forum

You will probably find its just a field mod. The driver or other crew member may have been handy at welding and just got permission to add it. Its not complex, just a flat sheet of metal. Its the kind of thing i would do in that situation if something wasnt right, fix it. People were a lot more manual/practical back then.

505 knocked off the zimmerit from their King Tigers to make a square on each side of the turret. They're not doing the whole tank, just a few inches by probably 2 feet section. They may not have even put the zimmerit back on.

Remember tank crews added items to their tanks even if it was against orders. Using track links as additional armour was forbidden by the Germans as it actually improved the penetration abilities of sub calibre rounds (it stripped off the soft outer body prior to the penetrator coming into contact with the main armour) but people still welded tracks on.

It's just a field mod it doesn't change the course of tiger history it's just a piece of 1/4 inch plate put to good use buy an innovative crew if it was a factory mod I would say the ends would be curved down to allow the water to run off better.
As a water engineer a lot of my tools and equipment were modded to make specific jobs less awkward I see no reason the same couldn't be applied to the tiger in question its not one for the history books just a bit of lateral thinking to make the drivers job slightly easier.

It's real and yes it exists but worth a lot of fuss...no
It doesn't prove the factory fitted them

Possibly early,mid late kinda covers the whole production run.

That guard would have been a piss-easy thing to do in field. localised removal of the Zim, and simple welds.
With all the other user friendly things a crew would do to assist in machine survivability and their own ability to fight the tank, this type of mod would I think be at the low end of things really.
I hazard a guess that with the wear involved over time of the visor going up & down, rain for sure could have made things hard for the driver after getting down into the sliding surfaces & vision block.
Whay not a simple weather strip bunged on by a capable crewman ?
I would write off any form of "factory" type mod. Too many other things going on and imagine the hassle booking in the tank with a request to fit a weather guard over the drivers vision block !!
Jeez, we have enough hassles getting our cars serviced properly

At the end of the day and given this forum, the question should be, should you fit one to your model tank. The answer is, if you want to. Assuming the picture is real, and i see no reason why it shouldnt be, then we know this is a real tiger1 with the mod. To me that makes a model with this mod still historically relevent.

Field trip! when we going?

lposter wrote:

So what part of history is missing ?

There is a growing tendency round here for a photo or dodgy provenance and possibly photoshopped to be thrown up and suggestions made that we all need to rethink what we previously knwe about Things.

To be honest, if someone presents a photo and it's in direct or partially contradictory to the research of Jentz and Doyle, I almost always just discount it as a fake.

I have always, with varying degrees of success tried to build historically accurate Tanks BUT nowhere in the rules of this Forum is there a demand for it,
You build what you want and if another member can help in that build then all well and good,
One of the delights of this place is the great diversity in how different people approach what would appear at first to be a very simple subject,
There are plenty of us who can remember the first pictures downloaded by Colonel ALPHA!!! My but they were different, but so what? it was his interpretation of our hobby and because it was unique it did not make it unacceptable.
And as to in field mods, what about the Bocage Busters fitted in the field to all manner of Tanks in service with the United States Army, the individual fittings are a boon to hobbyists because we are free to build our own design without fear of someone saying "OH NO THATS ALL WRONG"
I have built a Tiger1 of the early intake into Tunisia of which I can find only the barest information,"GREAT" It means I can get away with stuff because no one can prove otherwise, and then there is Hermans Panther, a brilliant take on a Tank which as far as he or anyone else knows was never actually built and yet it looks more authentic than some builds which purport to be accurate,
And here we are getting our knickers in a twist about an alleged "Rain Visor"?? Really!
Simon has proven to my satisfaction that such a devise was fitted on one or more in service Tanks which makes it an historically accurate fit.
But my point is, so what? If you want true accuracy go to BOVINGTON and other places of excellence this is not that place! We may echo accuracy, we do not act as the definitive shaun