This is the old Trumpeter kit, which is still available for ~ $85.00 If you can find it. I got this from John Ford's piles. The box was crushed along with the lower hull. I had to pry, cut, glue and clamp several sections to straighten it out again so it was usable.
Then I had to research it to see if I could figure out how the mechanisms were supposed to work. There are lot of missing pulleys, chains and hydraulics as the photos of the actual captured prototype only captured the parts visible. Much of this was not documented where I could find it, so I tried to reverse engineer from what was available. I added enough of it to make it look like it might work.
This was built on an extended Tiger II chassis. The side walls were on retractable railings which would be lowered for deployment of the canon or reloading it into onto the chassis.
Unfortunately the components were configured to allow the hinged sides to be lowered so I posed it in a halfway deployed position to make use of the mounting platform for the cannon.
I cant see any real purpose for this design. Why deploy and make stationary when it was already a mobile platform? It had a crew of nine and had no room to carry ammunition for the gun. There was barely room for the crew personal stowage.
I painted this in sections making the cannon a complete separate kit, which was detailed enough to stand on its own. I added crew stowage and some support steel, cables, chains for the deployment mechanism. The track was rubber and I had to insert broken drill bits to shape the sag.
I lightly weathered it with oils and provided the scratches, scrapes and rust as applicable.
Vince B. 6-24-17
