Hi all,

I've been working on my King Tiger again. I wanted to improve my track painting skills....well actually I just wanted to create them as I had none. I'm happy with the results myself, but any comments to improve for the next time are welcome!


1 - I've started with glueing the seperate tracks together. I left the tracks on each side of the tank in 2 pieces, so I could remove them from the tank after glueing which makes it easier to paint them. See also the third picture.





2 - Now, before I started painting, I covered the ends of the tracks with tape, because you don't want paint on parts which still need to be glued together.



3 - Now that the ends were protected against paint, it was time to use my airbrush. I sprayed the tracks in a mix of 70% X-10 and 30% XF-1.





4 - Time to give them a more rusty, used colour. I just tried some colours. In this case, 25% XF-2, 25% XF-7 and 50% XF-10.





5 - Now it was time to connect the 4 pieces of track together on the tank. You can see the unpainted tracks, thanks to the masking tape. As you can see, the colour of the tracks looks a little like the colour of the tank. I used XF-9 (hull red) for the tank.



6 - As the tracks didn't wanted to connect correctly here, I used iron wire to keep them together so the glue could dry. You can also see I've painted the first unpainted tracks in the gunmetal-black base colour.



7 - I was happy with the results, so I continued with a wash. I used a very dark brown oil paint for this. Little hard to see on the pic, but the wash is drying here.



8 - After the wash had dried, I decided to drybrush the tracks with a silver colour. I used XF-16.



Story can also be found here:

http://home.planet.nl/~noorl087/kttracks.htm

Greetings,
Martin

nice procedure there Martin!! looks u re going to have a nice kitty in the end. Keep us updated

That Tiger is coming along fine Martin. Your tracks looks great.

Thanks for the quick replies, and the kind words of course :-)

I've got to say I really like the looks of the King Tiger. Looks really dangerous, but it also has it's beauty...

Greetings

Martin very nice track work there. Will you be doing a hard edge camo? ambush scheme maybe? and will you be doing zimmerit? Cheers Kevin

Hi Kevin,

I'll use a hard edge ambush scheme. The base colour is hull red, and patches of dark-yellow and green will be sprayed on it.

This is one of the methodes of the Germans to save paint, because the hull red was the factory base colour. Instead of spraying the entire tank in dark-yellow and patches of red-brown/green, they now painted patches of dark-yellow and green so they didn't had to use red-brown.

I really like it, gives the tank a nice dark and dangerous look....

Here you can see some pics:





As you can see, no zimmerit. I believe it wasn't seen on new tanks by that time anymore...just on the surviving ones from summer/autumn 1944 (not much)

Greetings,
Martin

Great Job there. Those tracks look pretty impressive. I also like the camo pattern you chose. Looks like this will be a really great build.
Mary (++)

Very nice track painting.
Good luck with the rest of KING

Good work Martin, nice 'in progres' artikel

Groeten
Henk

You think I could write an article about it for the big A? There isn't one for trackpainting yet.....

Hey Martin,

Very good.
Are you going to dirty up the tracks a bit? With Mig or something??

I'd like the way how you have done the tracks!
I had the same tracks but that was difficult to hold the tracks clean (from glue).

I can't wait to see more pics of it!!
Greetz Hilbert

Martinn this one looks beautifull, and very nice and detailed article about doing tracks!

keep it going!

Hi,

The Königstiger will be driving on a muddy road (on a diorama), so the tracks and wheels will become very muddy too!

Hmm maybe I'll write an article about it....why not :-)

I can't wait to read it

Well you've read the most important things already in this thread :-)

Anyway, I wanted to start the camouflage job, but because of a (very small) fit problem with the lower and upper hull, I had some delay because the putty had to dry. After that, I wanted to have the tank at least fully sprayed in it's base colour (hull red). So I connected my airbrush to the compressor, I filled it with paint....and the thing didn't worked. Probably my own mistake, because after a good cleanup, it worked again. Maybe I forgotten something with cleaning the time before.

Anyway, the KT is ready for camouflage right now....hope to start this today!

Greetings,
Martin

Martinnnn -

Outstanding job and very informative description on the tracks. Results are really excellent. I'm working on a Tamiya "Ardennes Front" King Tiger for "AGE 2" Campaign and though it is required to be an OOB build (so I'll have to use the kit supplied tracks), I'm going to follow your example and see how they come out. Next will be the first "attempt" at the ambush colour scheme. Again thanks for the great examples and keep us up to date on your build.

Blade48mrd

Does it?? :-) :-)

No, you haven't explane how you build the tank etc etc


I'd believe I've seen pics of your ''progress dio''
With a truck, isn't it??

Goodbye for now Martinnnnnnnnnnnnnnn (sorry I couldn't resist anymore :-) :-) :-) LOL )

I was talking about an article about painting tracks :-)

You're right about the dio, only I decided to swap the Opel Blitz for a Sdkfz 251/1

Greetings

Ok I believe I have succesfully submitted an article about the tracks.....let's see if it appears on the feature page once :-)

Yo Martinn,

good progress on the tracks....
cant wait to see all of them finished..good luck!