
Tiger F13
Tiger is the most famous tank of WW2 yet I never built one. Until now. And I wanted it to be a special one.
I chose the F13 because it was truly something. The entire Fehrmann group was something of a “junkyard squad” with tanks built from different damaged and repaired vehicles, and sometimes their look reflected that a LOT!
There’s a lot of speculation involved because black and white historical photographs can only get you so far, but my interpretation was something along these lines: They took a damaged early Tiger that was painted in standard Panzer Grey, upgraded the suspension with a late-type drivetrain (hence the steel wheels painted in dark yellow), slapped some Zimmerit directly on top of the old paint coat (Zimmerit was otherwise applied on top of oxide primer in the factory), and painted the whole tank in Dark Yellow. It seems that the crew later repainted the entire tank with Olive Green as that became the new standard in early 1945.
The Zimmerit had a hard time sticking to the satin surface of the Panzer Grey and it came down in large sheets. The tank also saw some intense action and had several shell impacts on its armor. The photos clearly show the commander’s cupola sporting a more traditional 3-tone camouflage, so this part was definitely replaced at some point as well. The hand-painted tactical numbers are also hard to interpret. They could’ve been red with white outlines, but the shade of grey in the photos hints at a lighter color. The Olive Green sounded like an attractive idea as resources at the end of the war were scarce, and I can imagine the crew would use anything they could find.