GW Tiger fuer 21 cm Moerser 18

You maybe remember this guy, I got it exactly 1 year ago to christmas from my grandparents. I uploaded a pic of it at the beginning of this year and it has strangely become my most downloaded pic in my gallery(it has more downloady than views-how´s that possible?)
That pic showed the w tiger with no colour but assembled. For painting I asked a friend of my grandpa who is a specialist in painting of cars,busses etc and he painted my gw tiger. Actually it was painted months ago but I simply forgot to make pics of it until now.
Detail: Almost nothing is known about the GW Tiger because till the wars end only one incomplete prototype was found by the allies. The tank was a big weapons carrier intended to use the 17 cm Kanone , one of the most accurate big cannons of wwii. But plans existed to put the 21 cm mortar also on the Gw tiger, this is what you see here in my model kit. Both weapons used the same base,only the gun tube and its belonging parts were different. The GW Tiger was basen up on an enlarged tiger ii chassis with a big figting compartment at the rear. This compartment could be lowered o seperate the gun. he armour plating was rather thin, the front was just 30mm thick, the side armour 16mm. This was because this tank was intended to be used as a heavy artillery piece that should be fired from behind the main battle line. Because of the lighter armour the Gw Tiger was somewhat faster than the king tiger, reachinf 45 km/h on road. The engine was the same as in the tiger II. A MG 34 or 42 was placed as secondary armament. The Gw Tiger was huge, it was very large and wide, offering pretty good space for the crew to operate the gun. The fate of the prototype remains unknown to my knowledge. The prototype was almost finished, he gun was not yet installed and the only pics that exist of it show it without tracks. If this beast would have made it into combat it would have been used to carry the large guns tha were to heavy to be quickly transported by towing vehicles , into combat on a self propelled chassis. The 17 cm gun had a devastating punch and was very accurate , but it was very expensive and difficult to produce. The 21 cm Mörser 18 was the standard heavy mortar of the german Heer and looked rather unusual for a mortar as it had a long barrel tha looked more like a cannon than a mortar. It was less accurate and had less range than the 17 cm gun but packed more explosives in its shell. The name Grille(cricket) is sometimes found with hese vehicles, the 17 cm gun carrier is supposed to have been called Grille 17 while the 21 cm gun outfitting was called Grille 18. If these names would have been adopted by the german army is unclear. In former times nearly unknown, the Gw tiger has become quite popular in the last years as it is available in WOT.

The model kit: This kit is from trumpeter and has a quite high price of nearly 70€.It is in 1:35 scale so his is a huge beast of a tank .
Detail: Awesome, the deail in tanks from rumpeter is the best I have xpereinced in any model kit producer. Not only is the gun extremely detailed, a whole engine and gearbox is included. I left the latter out because you cant see it in the end.I left the fron engine plate unglued so you can open it and see the engine. The whole tank is literally coverd in detail and looks just awesome.
*****
Fitting: Yeah, the fitting is ...ok. It is mostly very good but I have some small issues: The biggest are the tracks: They lay very well lets say "uncomfortable" in the box and the were bent too much . I had some trouble applying them correctly onto te tank. The biggest problem is that the tracks dont reallly fi on the drive sprocket, I have never experienced that. The rest fitted well, the fighting compartment went together without problems only at the front side of the tank, the parts were a little bit offset. The gun itself went flawless together as did the engine.
****
Functions: This tank has some of the most awesome functions I have had in a tank kit. The Mg is movable, the ground plate which was used when firing is movable(there are springs attached to it but I somehow lost them). The gun is movable up and down which is very nice as the cylinders move with the gun, I think the breech is movable too and you can make the wheels on the external ground plate(which I didnt photographed because this is only needed when the gun is seperated from the tank which I did not do(I assembled the ground plate however )) move alhough the manual doesnt stae that. But now comes the best: The guns has an actual recoil mechanism! It can be slided for and backwards which is awesome.
*****
Decals: Well here I am not sure how to rate that because the kit hasnt any decals. The ki depicts i think a prototype tank and hose usually didnt have markings yet (which means no decals). The box art itself depicts the GW Tiger in an assembly hall so its clear that the designers of the it wanted to do a prototype which is fitting as the only produced Gw tiger was itself an incomplete prototype. S there arent any decals. I however took leftover decals from my Mörser Karl(still have to make a reveiw of that one oo someday) and decals from a Dragon Hummel howitzer(which has to be one of the worst model kits I have got because it was so awful, I stopped assembling it because it was so frustrating-the only case i didnt finish a model kit). The Mörser Karl decals are the Adam decal on he gun tuber(which is fitting because if my tank depicts one of the first ones ,the naem adam is fiting as does the number one on the fighting compartment which was also taken from leftover decals from my Karl.The funny hing is that the box art shows a number one on the fighting compartment as well so I got lucky there that I go such a decal from another kit. The rest of the decals were aken from the hummel (I just noticed that I still use that abomination of a model kit for all different kind of tests, including airbrushing est and even shootin test-yeah literally, I wanted to test some ideas of how to make battle damage on a tank(espeacially on the skirts, as I wanted to make some wholes into them. And what would be more accurate than an actual whole from a projecile weapon.So what i did was using my big airsoft shotgun and shot onto the side of the hummel kit. It didnt make any wholes but the impact of the projectile was so big that it knocked th complete side part of the fighting compartement of the kit off and send it flying through the room which looked spectacularXD)
But back to the gw tiger: Well it hasnt any decals but as a prototype this is normal. So I am not sure how to rate this so I will left that out.
Extrapoints: This monster is one of my favourite tanks, because its so big and mysterious as so few is known about it. The kit is very nice and it is among the stars of my tank collection.
*****
Fazit: What an awesome kit. It is excellent executed and just looks damn awesome. If you are a fan of big guns then this is something for you . It has a high price so if you dont have much money, you should The kit exists in 2 variants, one with he 21 cm Mörser, and with the 17cm gun which I really want too. If you have time, space and money to get one of these, then take it, its an excellent kit that I can highly recommend.
*****

Painting: As I said, a friend of my grandpa coloured it. I think he used red brown for the kit. He did an awesome job and it looks perfec on the tank. He left the spaces between the tracks and the bottom of the top structure out because the tracks were already glued on and i didnt want to remove them because i had quite a hard time to assemble them. But my grnadpas friend didnt want to get colour onto the tracks because the tracks should get a seperate colour(which I then applied later). I filled these spaces with rust colour(using my by then brandnew airbrush) and then painted the tracks black(which was neccescary as the rust colour didnt just got onto the free spaces but also on the tracks. The tracks were coloured in black by using a brush. Detail work includes the machine gun in the front which was painted black and the engine which was done in I think aluminium colour.