Next up, the Dragon pre-Zimmed Elefant. This is the first of three Dragon Zimmerit kits I got, the others being the Brummbar and the Porsche Jagdtiger.

I am highly impressed with the quality of the moulding of the Zimmerit effect, the quality of the kit overall and the subject itself never having built one of these beasts before.

It is an excellent kit and yours looks great.I like the details,your tracks and tow cables really stand out.

Sharp-looking elefant!

As Tony ID'd: nice tow cable! I think you caught the look of the CABLE very well.

Overall, looks pretty cool. These pre-zimm'd kits are quite nice, IMO - they come out well and capture the zimm look to-scale and depth. Sure saves us some time!

Couple of things I would suggest to make this thing pop a bit more:

Those cable ENDS... they look like bare new steel! Yikes! Rusted cable, bare, new steel ends! "Huh." Dry-brush on some dunkelgelb and then rust or dirty them up some? The real items (ends) were often painted dunkelgelb - and sometimes even camo-sprayed in-place by the crew when they applied their brown and green camo patterns. They could just as easily be just very dirty and rusted. The "new end appearance clashes a bit with your nice rusty CABLES.

The other thing which may make your zimm really pop - and which adds a very cool, IMO, dimension to zimm jobs and specially so on these, where the zimm is over only part of the sides - is to use a dark (burnt umber or even a mars black) wash over the zimm to deepen shadows in the cracks and grooves. IF you do this, it makes the zimm pop out as a texture and accentuates the valley nature of the zimm. After doing this sort of wash, the zimm'd portion may appear too dark relative to the rest of the vehicle... so dry-brush on or spray on a light coat of diluted dunkelgelb to return the tops of the zimm to a lighter shade more consistent with the non-zimm'd rest of the build. This can also be done very easily using some powdered chalk lightly brushed on to lighten the tops of the zimm coat... leaving nice shadows to pick your zimm out a bit!

Just a couple of suggestions. It's a very nice Elefant! Thanks for sharing it!

Bob

Bob, thanks for taking the time to comment! It really means a lot. As for your suggestions, the whole kit, especially the Zimmerit part, has been washed with W&N oils diluted in white spirit, and then drybrushed with light enamels to bring the Zimm out. I just tried to avoid overdoing it. As for the tow cable "sleeve", I've read somewhere - really can't find it right now, that these were made of some alloy that did not rust - hence the difference with the cables that tend to rust pretty fast. As for overpainting them, I'd have to overpaint the whole tow cable and I did not want that. But maybe I'll tone them down a bit somehow...

Trif;

Hi!

Sounds like you actually did the "right" steps on your zimm... it's really more that things don't show as well in pics as we might hope!

About the sleaves on the cable-ends - the only part(s) which I think you may want to address are those sleaves at the cable-end before the eyes - not the cable itself, which looks very very real and nice just the way it is! So, no, I am not suggesting that you repaint your whole cable - only do some messing-up of those sleaves, which look like new bare metal.

I am unsure indeed about whether those may have been made of any sort of "rostfrei" or non-rusting steel - and very very unlikely to be made out of aluminum. And not much else "non-rusting" would have been available for these things. Remember that these are heavy tow cables, so aluminum simply wouldn't cut it. Any form of "stainless" or non-rusting steel alloy was pretty expensive then as now - so probably not used in this rather basic and plebian application, I would think. But I am wholly prepared to be wrong!

In any case, perhaps most of these as seen in period pics appear to have been painted - either some industrial black enamel or over-painted with the regulation vehicle base-color. And of course they could be chipped and oh so dirty.

Hence my suggestion! "Toning down" the clean bare metal look would, I think, be a good step - whether it be simply smudgy dirt or some combo of "paint" and dirt or whatever.

Again, it's a nice build!

Bob