STURMTIGER BUILD

By Peter Symonds of Nottingham UK

After doing two Panthers, a Jagdpanther and Three Tigers a T34 and a Pz III and also a King Tiger sitting in my bedroom awaiting the cold winter wet weekends, there was one project that I had not tried.. a Sturmtiger!
The ready made Torro models are fine but a little too toy likeand lacking detail, beyond a quick repaint I couldn't seewhat I could do with one, so I decided to build something a bit special. Lou Peterbrige provided me with a Heng Long Tiger with Late war wheels, drive sprockets and suspension upgrades, And supplied by Imperial Modelbau of Germany a resin SturmTiger conversion Kit.
This was expensive but the altermate kit comprising three different mortars, two different top hatch designs and dozens of resin and white metal parts. Most impressivly its of scale thickness so its nearly 1/2'' thick in places.

I wanted it with all the hatches open this meant making as much internal detail as possible including, loading tray ammo racks and chairs. I had problems getting Sturmtiger shell and used 20mm spent cases until the crew at Battlefrontmodels came to my rescue and cast me some proper shells.
You can still see two 20mm shels masquerading as bunker busting shells.
The only real problem I had was attaching the upper shell there was very few contact between upper and lower hull. The track guards got in the wat as well as the tool boxes on the donor storm. Fortunately my dremel dealt with those its also dealt with the cables. After a few hours of swearing and some heavy duty soldering I was back on track.
In the end I used sausages of milliput (2 part epoxy puty) to force into the front and rear upper deck to fill areas and later created zimmerite with milliput to hide the front, rear and sides to hide poor fitting gaps. I tided up the area's with a scalpal and left over night to set.

Next was painting time I used 50/50 of Tamiya buff and desert yellow to make the base colour.
Then I over painted the camo colour with Vallejo model air Panzer Green and Tamiya Red brown. I used real photos' of a real Sturmtiger captured on the Rhur in 1945 (currently being kept in full working order in a museum in Germany)
The dashes were painted with a big wedge brush. After that it was just layers of flat earth and dilute grey to dirty and tone down everything.. then lots of oil and rust on the tracks.. finally on the shelf.
text by Peter Symonds of Nottingham UK.

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