The Hobby People store right around the corner from me had a couple of Tamiya's
1/35 RC kits. In winter 2003 I spied the Tiger II and decided that I had to have one for my new 1/35 collection.
The kit was a real pleasure to build-- it had the usual extremely
high quality moulding and well laid out parts breakdown expected from Tamiya kits. The motors, gears and related equipment
were a cinch to get together, and work very smoothly. I'm ready to get another one! (Maybe at this year's TamiyaCon) The basis
for the kit is Tamiya's newest "Series Turret" Tiger II, with all the best detailing etc one could expect. Please excuse the
BIG OL' GAP in the hull front--this would not be present on a purely static model. Since this is an RC kit it's necessary
for the upper hull to be removable for maintenance of the gears, motors etc.
There is only one thing I would have done differently on this kit had in retrospect:
There are two rear plates included for the hull, one with a hole for the RC antenna, one without. I would have used the second
(static kit) rear plate without the hole for the antenna had I realized how well the RC would work without
the antenna. The antenna is pretty thick and interferes with turret rotation. and somewhat unsightly; takes away
from the look of the finished kit IMHO.
Another caveat: the "RC" rear plate has a different fitting for the jack mount--a
weird 'platter' that just sort of sticks to the back plate onto a couple of nubs and into a slot. I couldn't find any sources
that showed the jack mounted as they would have it for this RC version, so I clipped the nubs and filled the slot, trimmed
the mounting pegs off of the regular jack mounts and positioned them onto the rear hull.
Other than that there were zero problems with this kit.
