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Tiger I, Ausf. E of the schw. PzAbt. (heavy tank unit) 503, Now Posselok, Aug. 1943 

To be honest I started to build this model with mixed emotions: At first I did not like the early "Tiger" too much as my favourite has always been its later production lines and secondly I did not feel familiar to the scale. Being used to 1:35 kits it appeared simply too small to me.

But the more I slipped into this project the more I began to like it. Even though the early Tiger misses some of the photogenic additions of its successors it has some advantages. When it appeared on the battlefield the Tiger´s fighting capabilities were so much superior to its opponents that it was able to survive the fierce battles of WW2 significantly longer than the later Tigers were after the Allies had managed to close this gap.

So the early Tiger is for sure a most worthy object for extensive application of various battle damage and heavy weathering - as mentioned before the main reason for me to choose a modelling subject. In addition looking at the breathtaking jobs some guys do in particular with 1:48 model planes (or even smaller scaled) made me rather ambitious. Thus I was after reaching approximately the same level of detail I had become used to in 1:35 to take this challenge.

A detailed description of this project is featured in the "Tamiya Model Magazine International", issue 139, May 2007. Another article has been published in the German "Kit Militär-Modell Journal", issue 2/2007, which has also been featured in the Italian "Model Time" magazine, issue 133/August 2007.