Pimp your Tiger - Takara King Tigers

I have a lot of 1/144 Takara models, particularly from the versus sets. They used to be very easy to get hold of any still many of them are not too bad in terms of availability or cost. They are nicely detailed and the general painting is fine, but some of the equipment detail painting is a bit haphazard. You can see an overview of various manufacturers in a general review I did.

I always to some work on my Takara models, at the very least a wash of Games Workshop Agrax Earthshade which brings out the detail a treat. Anyway here is a finished King Tiger platoon and a command tank. They are all enhanced versions of the Takara versus set King Tiger. After the main pictures I will describe what I did and show against the original vehicle.

The command tank has the turret drilled out and a metal German command figures from Arrowhead glued in. Panzer Korps Tigers come with two hatches for the turret and so I used a spare for the open hatch. I also added some track pieces which come with the versus sets (cut down slightly).

The basic process was:

• Paint the equipment (spades, axes etc.);
• wash the hull and turret in Agrax Earthsahde;
• some additional wash in Nuln Oil (black) for engine grills and muzzle break;
• add mud effect to wheel, and bottom edges of vehicle at front and back (using Vallejo paints, first German Cam Medium Brown, then Flat Earth and finally German Cam Orange Ocher);
• Decals added to turret (number and cross) and front Glacis (divisional marking). Check out my post on decals;
• Then finally some track pieces on a couple of the vehicles.

Now some comparisons with the model in its original (out of the box) paint scheme.

You can see how the wash tones it down and really brings out the detail (NB if you enlarge the photos by clicking on them then you can see the differences much better). I have added an SS divisional marking on the front.

Original had no decals so added turret numbers and German crosses:

As well as the Agrax Earthshade general wash I used a black wash (Nuln Oil) on the engine grills:

Aslo some black wash on the muzzle break:

The equipment pieces on the side, before and after:

Equipment on the top of the hull, before and after. You can see the ax in particular had not really been painted in the original:

You can see a summary of all my WW2 posts on my WW2 Summary page. And links to manufacturers pages on the WW2 manufacturers page.