Building a Mid-Production Normandy Tiger 1
Posted: Wed Oct 26, 2011 3:32 pm
Last summer – around the time I discovered this site – I just happened to mention to my older boy that I could, if he wanted, ‘do a few things’ to ‘improve’ his Tiger. Like open up the front hatches. Extend the main gun. Maybe even change it to a late production model. No doubt believing all of this would take his dad about a week or two he readily agreed. We are now getting on for a year since that conversation and still it’s not finished. So this Tiger is still very much work in progress (although I have solemnly promised I will finish it by the end of the year SPOILER ALERT: THIS PROMISE WILL BE BROKEN).
This has all been quite nostalgic for me. I was a keen AFV modeller in my youth – even winning a couple of medals at the Model Engineer Exhibition at Wembley (in ’81 and ’83 I think). But I downed tools when I was about 15. It didn’t help that my teenage friends thought my hobby was extremely uncool. At the same time I was in a band – which everyone thought was extremely cool. So I gave up and – apart from sneaking a look at modelling magazines every month or so in my local newsagents – kept my interest a guilty secret. But hey, fast forward 28 years or so and now I’m a dad I have the perfect excuse!
So far it has been quite a learning curve for me. For a start electronics have never been my strong point – in the past I always modelled static vehicles. However, undoubtedly one of the main attractions of the Heng Long (and Tamiya) tanks is the fact that they move, shoot and make a noise! For anyone starting out here I would offer the reassurance that, speaking as a virtual dunce when it comes to electronic matters, it is mostly just a matter of common sense of the ‘follow that wire’ variety. Whenever I haven’t been able to work out an answer for myself I have invariably found everything I needed to know from this site.
My old modelling skills have certainly come in handy (and even some of my original tools). Having been accustomed to working in 1/35th scale the step up to 1/16th is quite a dramatic one – so many things that used to drive me nuts because they were so fiddly are a great deal easier on the hand and eye when they are so much bigger. The flip side is that, because of the nice thick plastic, when sawing, cutting and sanding quite a lot of elbow grease is required.
A few words of praise here for the Heng Long Tiger: it’s obviously copied from the Tamiya kit and it may be a little-oversimplified in places, but it’s mostly well moulded (not too many sink holes, etc) and it really stands up to rough handling.
Talking of tools there are a few that I consider indispensible, but top of the list would have to be a rotary tool for cutting, sanding, drilling etc. Mine came from Maplins [a UK high street electronics supplier], but I also bought an additional set of attachments which has given me more options. Sometimes it’s just a question of finding the right tool for the job. For example when I was first considering opening up the front hatches I began by thinking some sort of circular cutter would do the job, but in the end it was accomplished fairly easily (and very messily) by drilling a rough hole in the centre of each hatch and then using a circular sander to enlarge the openings.
Once I had decided to get to grips with the Tiger the first question I had to decide was: which phase of the vehicle’s development this was going to be? Because of my youthful experience I thought I knew a great deal about the tank: there were early Tigers and there were later Tigers. The Heng Long model is the early one – drum cupola, Feifel air cleaners, dished road wheels and no zimmerit. Then there was the later one which had the lower cupola, no air cleaners, all steel road wheels and all that bumpy stuff. Right? Wrong! The more I started to look into it, the more I realised that there was a whole lot of variation in between.
First I looked through postings on this site and then I bought some books. Of course, many of these are not cheap and be warned: it’s very easy to spend far more on books than your tank! Since I was last purchasing tank books in the 80s one of the pleasant surprises for me was the wealth of new pictures that had come to light since. The more I absorbed these reference sources the more I came to realise that my presumed knowledge of the Tiger was actually full of holes. For a start there was a mid-production variant of the tank which I had so far overlooked. It also became clear that, as the tank developed, the modifications which led to the mid and late production variants were often introduced gradually – with many retrofitted to existing tanks – meaning that there is a great variety of possible combinations.
I always wanted to turn this into a Normandy Tiger, taking my initial inspiration from the famous Villers-Bocage episode. On the other hand I wanted to avoid spending too much time and money (how little I really knew!) so the mid-production model seemed the best bet. Eventually I realised – after joining the dots between various sources – that there were several of these tanks in the hands of s.SS-Pz.Abt.101 (Michael Wittman’s Battalion) during to Normandy campaign. Indeed one particular example – numbered ‘334’ – was captured intact by the British forces and shipped back to Britain for evaluation and, ultimately, destruction on the gunnery range at Lulworth Cove in Dorset.
I can recommend this as a project for those who are neither time or cash rich, although I feel bound to repeat the warning which many others have made on this site: once you start changing one of these tanks it’s very, very hard to stop. It’s a little like redecorating only half a room – the new stuff tends to make the old look a little shoddy. Before you know it you’re surfing the net looking at all those after-market goodies and thinking: “Just one more metal add-on and then I’ll call a halt...” At the end of the day any changes are a matter of personal choice, but sometimes I wonder if I have started to lose sight of the wood for the trees!
So here, not necessarily in chronological order, is the story of my Mid-Production Normandy Tiger 1. Most of this, if not all, will be familiar to existing users of this site, but speaking as someone who only joined in December 2010 I think it will be useful if I list even the most basic changes. I will also discuss some of the options which I have explored as I went along, including choosing from the various add-ons available on the internet – especially Tamiya spares and the Hachette ‘Build Your Own Tiger’ magazine.
What needs to be changed
The external (i.e. non-electronic) changes fall into two categories. First there are the basic modifications which would apply to anyone seeking to improve a Heng Long Tiger. Then are those specific changes which apply to this particular mid-production variant and which attempt to mimic those adaptations which the Germans made themselves.
Basic changes to any Tiger 1 production model
The options here are really only limited by your enthusiasm, time or budget. Working down the tank and then front to back:
A. Turret
1. For those with the older HL models the gun mantlet is upside down and has to be rotated so that the co-axial machine gun port is to the right of the main gun (looking forward). This can be done with the existing parts and a little patience but has now been corrected on all HL stock Tigers;
2. The middle part of the barrel is stuck in the recoil position and needs to be extended. This can be done quite cheaply with a metal insert. The alternative, for those who want to do without the bb function – and especially for those who want to install working barrel recoil – is to buy a new metal replacement for the whole barrel;
3. The turret ring is too far forward beneath the turret and the corresponding opening in the hull top is thus also too far forward in order to compensate. This means that the turret sits correctly (more or less) when the gun faces forward, but once it is turned it starts to look wrong – e.g. the rear turret stowage bin sticks out over the side of the tank when it should not. The only way to fix this is to move the turret ring and hull opening back, a job which is not for the faint-hearted. This also has important consequences for those who wish to retain the bb gun because it was presumably to accommodate the bulky mechanism that HL chose to move the ring forward in the first place. It is less of a problem for those who wish to install a recoil mechanism;
4. A related problem is the undercut at the rear of the turret. This shouldn’t be there but, because of HL’s mis-alignment of the turret ring, had to be incorporated to allow the turret to traverse without fouling on the tow ropes and gun cleaning rods. Once the turret ring position is corrected this problem disappears and so the cut-out portion can simply be restored;
5. Something else that needs to be considered is the way in which HL have designed the top and bottom of the turret to fit together – along a line around the lower sides of the turret. Obviously this join shouldn’t be there, although it’s not especially noticeable. It becomes a more pressing problem if you want to add zimmerit. There is a solution, however, which I will discuss below.
6. A less obvious defect concerns the front of the turret and the mantlet. The front of the turret actually sticks out slightly too far. Meanwhile the main gun – on the HL Tiger it sits bang in the middle of the mantlet – should actually be off-set slightly towards the right (i.e. the co-axial machine gun side). This is the sort of thing which only the most ardent ‘correctors’ should consider because (quite apart from being a pain to alter) to my eye this is hard to spot - unless you're actually looking for it!
7. The rear stowage bin also has issues. The most obvious problem is the fact that the rectangular hole between the bin and the rear of the turret should be deeper to allow the rear lifting trunnion (which is absent) to be seen. Less obviously the front of the bin (which is nicely detailed with rivets just like the real thing) should not overlap the top of the rear turret armour – it should simply sit behind it. Finally the shape is wrong when viewed from the top: the sides should not be angled quite so sharply inwards from back to front. The first defect is quite easy to correct, but the second and third would require so much work that you might as well replace the bin altogether. If you decide to keep it the padlock latches should also overlap the rear. Finally, on the more recent HL Tigers they have added two securing strips on each side – these were only used on early models;
8. The side trunnions at the front of the turret sides will also need their lifting pegs added (and the one at the rear added altogether);
9. The gunner / loaders side vision ports may also need to have a slit added. These have been added to more recent HL Tigers but the slit is not particularly convincing;
Next: the hull...