DML 1/35
Bergpanzer Tiger (P)

History

For the history of this vehicle, I am going to refer readers to my in-box review here.

Construction

DML is a prolific model company that has had literally hundreds of AFV kits and aircraft kits on the market over the years. The company is based in Hong Kong. The kit comes in a tray and lid type box. The box art shows a Bergpanzer Tiger (P) pulling a turreted Tiger and being guided by a crewman standing in front of it.

Inside the kit are 16 medium gray parts trees, two frets of brass PE, two lengths of metal wire (to fabricate tow cables from) and three lengths of metal chain in 2 gauges. The tracks are glueable vinyl rubber-band type. There are many, many parts that are blued out on the parts illustrations in the instructions as being excess/spares, not needed to complete the kit. You are really going to have a whole lot of parts to put into your spares box afterwards. However, two of the parts that are blued out are ACTUALLY NEEDED and mistakenly blued-out. These are 4of part number E7. They are the end pieces for the 2 tow cables.

There are a total of 16 assembly steps. Steps 7 through 13 are repeated twice. The first set of these is if you are going to do the early production version. The second set of these steps is if you are going to do the late production version. I opted to do mine in the early version.

In the first step, I painted the road wheels with sand brown rims and black tires. This was easier than trying to do these once they would be attached to the rest of the tank. I then assembled the bogies and painted them sandy brown too. In step 2 you have to open a lot of location holes with a pin vice drill. I found out that the 2 holes I drilled into part number J1, which is the hull bow plate, and are for later fitting of the spare tracks retaining bar, are actually too far apart. When adding the bar later I had to putty one hole and re-drill a second hole at the spacing of the location pin on the bar.

In step 4, you attach the road wheels and assemble the drive sprockets and add them to the hull. I left the road wheels off till later, so as to be able to paint the hull easier behind them. There is a set of drive sprockets at each end of the tank and they are different. So, make sure you get the right ones on the front sides of the hull and on the rear sides.

In step 5 you add two mud scrapers (parts E24) to the sides of the hull with their blades between the two sides of the drive sprocket.
Step 6 has you add some very small (and easily overlooked) part numbers K6 to the tops of the hull sides. You also have to shave off some rivet detail. The instructions tell you to add the vinyl tracks at this point, but I chose to leave them off until almost last. I did paint them a red brown with some steel color drybrushing and some Rub-N-Buff silver drybrushing.

I then began the first set of steps 7 to 13 indicated for the early version. These steps went along without a hitch. You do have to be careful adding the fender hinge springs (parts number E23) in step 10, as they are quite small and will require using a needle nosed tweezers.

In step 11, I ran into the fact that the attachment points on parts number L13 and L-12 protruded out onto the parts and had to be whittled and sanded off.

Steps 12 & 13 went along without a hitch. In step 13 you assemble the 220mm long lengths of metal wire onto the L36 and L21 plastic cable end parts. The jack is also assembled in this step, and you opt to use either plastic part number B26 or PE part number MA4 for a tie-down bracket.

Step 14 is the assembly step for the pulleys, blocks, hooks, crane parts and chains for the crane. It is not all that clear here just how the chains go. I had to study things very closely for about the better part of an hour to get things right. There are 2 lengths of a lighter gauge chain in lengths of 135mm and 150mm and a heavier chain in 220mm length. I found out, when I went to thread these chains through things that the heavier chain would not pass through part number N10 and around pulley wheel N26. So, I used extra length of one of the lighter gauge chains that I had left over. I also used Black-N-It liquid to darken these chains, per Cookie Sewell’s suggestion in his in-box review. It worked great and looks real good.

I painted the tank with sand brown base and red-brown and dark green wave pattern camouflage (all Tamiya brand colors in acrylic). I then added the German National crosses and the division marking for sPzJgAbt 653 to the front and rear. The jack , road wheels and treads were also added now.

Conclusion

This is one neat kit. I have two of them and intend to do the late version with the second kit later. This kit lends itself to a lot of diorama ideas and is highly recommended..