Grompix's Elefant Build

[grompix]

Right chaps here’s the first part of the build for the Elefant but you need a bit of history first.

Back in 2005 I bought an Elefant kit on e-bay (here we go again!) from a guy called Shaun Allen (hammerhelm) who does casts of 1/16th scale stowage, sandbags, crew figures and the like. His stuff is always made from dental plaster, a bit brittle but generally OK if liberally coated in PVA glue and handled wisely. It’s a lot harder than Plaster of Paris anyway.

He has a website called ‘Tanks and Trolls’ and the kit he sold contained parts to turn a Tamiya King Tiger aluminium hull and suspension into an Elefant look-alike(ish).

Here’s the page on his website:-
http://www.tanksandtrolls.co.uk/elefantpage.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Here is a picture of the kit of parts from his instructions CD. Some parts are plaster cast with the rest being marked out on plasticard. Obviously the Tiger II overlapping wheels are not part of the kit and were never what Dr Porsche had in mind for his ‘Ferdinand/Elefant’ anyway. I always had a sort of vague idea I could ‘do something’ with the incorrect suspension after I had put it all together.


It looks like he took moulds from an original Imai Elefant kit as the mistakes on the Imai kit match up exactly with his casts.


I had an old 80’s clutch type Tamiya King Tiger that was past its best and I had earmarked it for this conversion. After building the plasticard hull and assembling the plaster casts and running it around the garden on its Tiger II steel wheels for a while I thought I’d have a go at improving the look of the suspension. The Tiger II tracks were obviously too wide so they had to go and the sprockets as well. I decided that Tiger I tracks would not be too far out from the Elefant’s and the Tiger I sprockets looked much better. So, having purchased a set of plastic Tamiya Tiger I tracks and two sets of sprockets from Ebay I needed to do something about the wheels. The Tiger steel wheels looked too big for the Elefant so they had to go into the spares box. I needed to get the ‘paired-bogie’ look of the Porsche vehicle somehow. I did it by drilling out the hull to re-position the torsion bars and swing arms into pairs. You can see on the photo that I just hooked up the torsion bars at various angles so they fitted the new positions of the swing arms. Not pretty but it worked!


I wracked my brains on what to use for the wheels (even using Pershing ones for a while) but eventually decided on making a master wheel and casting copies of it in a silicon rubber mould. This is what I ended up with:-





And that was as far as it got. Real-life and other projects beckoned and the poor old Elefant remained a dust gatherer for another 5 years! For those of you that are interested though (and can’t wait ‘till Hooben get their finger out!) I’m pretty sure Shaun still does his Elefant kits. Just drop him e-mail with lots of begging phrases thrown in!

More build pics soon.

[xrad]

Could you tell us more about how exactly you casted the wheels??

Great stuff!

[Saxondog]

I would be interested in the mold making,and the material needed to create the molds.Blake

[grompix]

Hi Folks
I get all my casting stuff from Alec Tiranti:-

http://www.tiranti.co.uk/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

This is the master I made for the wheels. I made it from a piece of nylon rod turned on my lathe and used pins to represent the rivets.

The master wheel was then placed in a box (made out of lego bricks) and the rubber mixed and poured over the top. I should have painted the rubber over the master first before pouring to get rid of potential air pockets but I forgot; hence the air bubbles in the cast wheels!

The rubber is RTV101. I chose that as it has a good resistance to heat and can take low melting point alloys. (At the time I wasn't sure whether I would cast the wheels in resin or metal).

I used G26 resin as it was very fast setting and tough when set. It comes in two tins one of hardner and one of resin. You mix equal amounts before pouring. I found it set in about 10 minutes.


I was going to fit brass bearings in each wheel and fix it in place with a small bolt to the Tamiya King Tiger swing arms but I finished one wheel and never got past that point.


All the wheels, sprockets and tracks on my finished Elefant are the Asiatam metal ones.

http://www.asiatam.de/advanced_search_r ... 6b44530f19" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

So, all that casting was a bit of a waste of time really but perhaps I can use them for another project (Oh no!!! )

Hope this helps folks
Cheers
Chris

[grompix]

The Asiatam Ferdinand/Elefant sprockets, track, and suspension bogies are very impressive. All the wheels and the front sprockets are fully fitted with ball races. The suspension bogies work the same way as the Porsche originals (but using a coiled spring instead of a transverse torsion bar!). The photographs on the Asiatam website show rubber mounts for the suspension stops but none of those came in my kit. They are not needed anyway and you can’t see them on the finished vehicle (unless you are looking underneath!)




Here are some close-ups of mine. No instructions came with the suspension kit; you are left to work things out yourself. I suppose Asiatam brought out the kit as an upgrade to the Hooben Elefant (if it ever materialises on the mass-market that is) but fortunately everything is pretty obvious with a close look. I did notice that the mounting points on the bogies were a bit high and off-centre but I figured out that you can adjust this by rotating the swing-arm stop at one end of each bogie. You also need to swap the wheels around to get the peculiar Ferdinand/Elefant arrangement looking correct (the rear bogie on each side has to be mounted back to front).







All-in-all, everything was much MUCH better than my resin cast efforts. Now I needed to figure out a way to mount everything on the old much-abused KT aluminium hull tub.

Cheers
Chris

[[ICE]monkey]

im sure you will find a use for the cast wheels, good job wih them , the asiatam suspension and wheel set up looks great
regards, ice

[fv432]

Fantastic build Chris glad to see you back to it
cant wait to see it done but im admiring the work so far

[BREL]

great build, Looking forwards to seeing the completed tank

[grompix]

Thanks for all your kind comments chaps. It feels really good to be back ‘on the building site’ again. Here's some more build pics.

After the Asiatam units arrived I pulled out the torsion bars strips and stays from my old KT hull pan. First thing I noticed when I put the Asiatam bogies up against the pan was just how deep the Tamiya KT aluminium tub was. Looking at the drawings of Ferdinands/Elefants the hull seemed a lot shallower.


I think this was because I had chosen the lip on the tub sides to mount the side fenders. If I had chosen to mount the side fenders lower down then there wouldn’t have been a problem. I could just leave it of course and hope no one would notice the discrepancy but since the hull bottom is clearly visible between the wheels, I decided things needed to be changed.

So I cut the bottom off the tub with my trusty Dremel!


…and re-attached it about 12mm higher and pop-riveted everything in place. Maybe it would have been easier just to lower the side fenders but never mind!

Next I carefully marked out the positions of the suspension bogies. They are mounted with obvious gaps between each bogie so I wanted to get them looking right and positioned correctly in relation to the hull and superstructure too. That’s when I noticed the wheel spacing on the Hooben elefant looks decidedly odd.

What's going on with the wheel spacing here I wonder..?

I drilled holes in the hull to take the bogie mounts and used pieces of the original King Tiger torsion bar stays cut off and positioned just inside the hull tub to form anchor points for the suspension bogies. Had to make sure the Porsche bogies were secure but could still rotate easily.

…and another one.


Picture from the rear. The motors and gearboxes were made some time ago by Marcus Horne of RCPanzer.de.
http://www.rcpanzer.de/apportal/main.php" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Superb engineering but sadly he doesn’t make them any more. They give a very quiet slow speed – perfect for an Elefant.


Everything in place.


Made a pair of track tensioners from expanding metal wall plugs (B&Q).


More pics to come shortly.
Cheers
Chris

[grompix]

Hi Folks
The next thing to do was to spray the wheels, sprockets and suspension units with Halfords red oxide primer. I used their primer prep spray first (as recommended on the tin). I don’t know if it made any difference but the primer went on OK. I left that to dry overnight. Next was Tamiya XF60 Dunkelgelb airbrushed on in two coats leaving a couple of hours drying time between coats. I then brushed on a wash of Humbrol matt black, earth brown and matt varnish thinned with white spirit so the dark solution would run into all the cracks and crevices. I laid the sprockets, suspension units and wheels on their backs while the solution dried overnight.




Then the sprockets, units and wheels were lightly dry-brushed with a mixture of acrylic white and Tamiya XF60 to pick out the raised surfaces.


I did the same thing with the outside of the aluminium tub then fitted everything back on the hull.


One thing that I definitely wanted to fix was the gap between the superstructure front and the armoured air vents on the deck. Here is a pic from Shaun’s instruction CD.


Shortening the hull was not an option as it was already slightly too short anyway (I discovered the Imai deck is too!). As the superstructure is also slightly too short, I decided to lengthen it by cutting it in half and adding a 10mm spacer with lots of Halfords car body filler!



Still more pics to come.
Cheers
Chris