RC Tank Warfare community hobby forum

Hi All,

I hope I'm posting this, my first attempt at picture posting, in the correct Forum location. And, I hope all will excuse the seemingly haphazard manner of posting as my own experience downloading to the Forum was a bit different from suggested picture posting guidelines.

The first picture purportedly shows an early Porsche-turreted Tiger II of Schwere Panzer-Abteilung 506 as it sits on a railroad car after the battalion was put on alert following the Allied landings in Operation Market Garden. The picture can be seen on p. 285 of Schneider's Tigers In Combat, Volume I.

What I found interesting about the tank was the Tiger I-style exhaust stacks and shrouds and the armored pot covering the telescoping motor deck air intake.

The other pictures show my relatively recently purchased Tiger build to similar configuration. I found the tank, which had received a number of high-end upgrades, on Ebay in Germany. Though it looked good, it had possibly been mishandled as it was damaged in a number of places. I shipped the wounded beast off to a modeler whose talents know no bounds, a chap named Gary Farrow, in Essex, UK who worked wonders on the model. The pictures really don't do justice to Gary's extensive re-fit of the tank.

A lot has been written about the tank in the original picture, some of which centered around the exhaust and shrouds and the armored intake vent. If the configuration of this tank is a topic of interest, I hope the collective brain-trust that resides at this site will chime in.

Looks great nice job

Very good looking KT you built yourself. The only thing you should do is paint some steel on the tracks, with only rust it looks like its a derelict KT that has sat in a field for some time with rust taking over.

That looks great.

Thought I'd seen most of the pic's of the KT, can't say I've ever come across that one...interesting!! Great work on your Tam KT by the way, loverly looking kitty..


Jake

This is my favorite version of the King Tiger, and yours is the nicest one I've ever seen built. The snorkel cap on the rear deck and the sheet metal exhaust guards really give it a distinctive look and set it apart. Thank you for sharing the pictures of it; I plan to save them for future reference.

That is a really excellent model,
and a very interesting version of the King Tiger...Please can you supply a link to the site that you found the photo on ?

First, thanks to all who've commented positively on this build. As I mentioned above, I'm not the original owner of this model. The way she appears today is largely the result of the superb workmanship of the chap I mentioned in the original write-up who has the know-how I lack.

I have to believe that the inspiration to fashion the original build in this configuration came from the picture that appears in Tigers In Combat, Volume I by Wolfgang Schneider at page 285. There, the Tiger I-type straight exhaust stacks, which were installed on only a few early production Tiger IIs between January and March 1944, are surrounded by what appears to be cut down sheet metal shrouds similar to those on the Tiger I (the tank ahead of this one also has the small metal shrouds, but has the more standard curved exhaust stacks). This tank also has the armored intake vent cover that was apparently installed on a very few early Tiger IIs up until March 1944, according to Jentz and Doyle's Germany's Tiger Tanks Vk 45.02 to Tiger II.

A few more pictures of the early Tiger II in this configuration appear in the Jentz and Doyle work on page 73. The picture in the Schneider book appears to show that the shrouds extend above the the height of the rear engine deck. The pictures in the Jentz and Doyle book show that the shrouds extend only as high as the engine deck though I suppose that could difference could be the result of camera angle.

I hope that some of the real experts on the Tiger will chime in on these very early Porsche Tiger IIs.