Urban Tiger page 2 On the bright side the VLS engine was fairly nice and cast all in one chunk. All that was needed was a bit of grinding to refine some of the undercuts. I removed one of the air cleaners from the top of the engine to be different. It really took some searching to find some period color shots of a Maybach motor, those combined with a little artistic license and I came up with a color scheme that I thought was pretty close to accurate and was visually appealing to me. The block itself was painted semi gloss black while the valve covers were painted with Tamiya XF-65 Field Grey. Details and various parts of the motor were picked out with many shades of metallic and flat black. The exhaust manifolds on the sides were painted brighter rusty tones while the thin sheet metal guards that cover most of them were painted a darker burned rust to suggest it had once been painted rather than natural metal. The rest of the engine was treated to various washes and scuffs and scrapes using everything from oil paints to colored pencils to achieve a used and abused look. In the following picture the remaining air cleaner on top is field grey but it was eventually painted white. Following references available, plumbing was added from large silver solder (the two large down pipes) and small styrene rod to busy up the compartment. After nearly a month of dorking around with all this interior stuff it was time to finally mount the engine in its bay and close up the hull. Hallelujah! After closing the hull the next major hurdle to jump is the zimmerit found on mid and late model Tigers. In the past I’ve tried everything from bondo (a Southerners best friend) to Milliput... Never really satisfied with my efforts I once again tried something new... Aves Apoxie Sculpt. This stuff is magical in my book. It kneads together easy and stays workable for more than an hour. For the zimmerit I simply roughed up the plastic a bit with some 120 grit and mixed up the Apoxie according to the instructions. Using various flat tools and liberal amounts of water to keep the tools from sticking the Apoxie Sculpt was spread over the surface to a thickness of about 1/32 of an inch and smoothed out as best as possible. For this project I used a small coping saw blade to trawl out the ridges. Before trawling though I ground the kerf off the blade so that the teeth were narrower and all in line rather than offset to each side. I used the blade with the teeth pointing down. Copious amounts of water is needed to keep the blade moving but not so much that you soak through the putty and release it from the plastic (I had problems with this in some places). It’s a tricky balance but with some practice it works pretty well. As it happened I was modeling a lot of damage to the zimmerit so most of the bad spots were just scraped off and made into "flaked" areas. I love armor modeling. All in all I was happy with the results but I could definitely use some more practice. copyright©2006 ausfwerks