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Recycling Your Old Kits

Kirin Kingtiger Porsche-type - mating an 80's Tamiya Jagdtiger lower hull with a Kirin Kingtiger Henschel hull and turret

Some of you might be aware of the following problem. You have a lot of un-built kits which have been outdated by newer fabricates . Rebuilding them to so called "up to dates standard" costs a lot of time and is sometimes very difficult. Selling those kits at flea-markets for an average price is almost impossible.

I had the opportunity to buy a Kirin Kingtiger Porsche type conversation for an appropriate price and could convince my friend Heinz to buy the Kirin Henschel version. As we both have a Tamiya Jagdtiger, released in the 80ies, I decided to use the lower hull, running gear and tracks to complete the Kirin conversions, rather than to use the new Kingtiger release from Tamiya. Easy task, I thought...

As I am building tanks for Heinz too, I decided to start his Henschel type, as sort of a dress rehearsal for my Porsche type.

The Kirin kit comes along in only 6 parts, no instructions. The hull, the rear hull plate, the turret, the front armor of the turret, the reverse turret hatch and a piece of zimmeritted resin intended to be glued on the front armor of the lower hull. The resin is pale yellow, soft and the parts had almost no flash. This is the most beautiful and bubble free resin kit I ever opened and I must congratulate those guys who managed to produce such perfect parts, especially the hull. The hull was a bit bend, as the thickness of the part is so delicate but with supergluing some plastic sprues on the inside I could overcome this problem. Although I do not have the Tamiya Kingtiger, 90's version, I soon found out that the Kirin conversion is nothing else than a copy of the Tamiya parts with zimmerit added. I do not know the opinion of the "copyright police" on that, but it would be interesting to hear their point of view.