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In my local hobby shop last year I discovered they had some new smallscale offerings and found some brightly coloured boxes there with Chinese & English text on the front, labelled as 1/72 scale tanks by a company called CC Lee.
Inside I found a well-packaged and easy to assemble kit, nicely detailed, with crisp casting and made in a flash free hard plastic (styrene). The box also contained a large plastic base for displaying the kit, together with a sheet of various well printed decals, and even a small tube of glue. It's practically a snap-together model, at least as far as the lower hull section is concerned, and the tracks and wheels are all moulded into one single piece. From the small number of parts and following the simple instructions it took me less than 20 minutes to put everything together. I would imagine that for those who like kits with link-n-length tracks, photo-etched parts, etc., etc., then this might not be their cup of tea, but then again it all depends on your tastes and preferences and I found it more than adequate for my needs. It could easily be spiced up using, say, tracks and wheels from the Revell Tiger, or by adding home-made Zimmerit maybe, then some extra stowage, etc., etc., all of which would make for an enjoyable experience too.
I posed a coule of crew figures who are slightly modified Airfix Luftwaffe personnel that seemed to have the right kind of poses for the job in hand.
The only information I have is what I have gleaned from a couple of websites on internet, and it appears there were only one or two of them ever used anyway. The crane is far too flimsy for any real heavy work, so it's wartime use was probably limited to laying charges under enemy fire. Check out this interesting link that might shed some light on it's history by Gary Zimmer from Australia http://members.tripod.com/~fingolfen/tiger/zimmberge.html I have no idea about current availability of this kit, nor where it can be purchased or who the distributors may be in varous parts of the world unfortunately. However, if you do find a source for the kit, well at least hopefully from these photos you'll have some idea what it's like before buying. Finally, a couple of shots alongside an Airfix 1/76 scale wargame standard Tiger Tank for comparison.
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John-Michael Murray
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I have actually bought CC Lee's range of 1/87 scale houses before and they
are good quality and as the kit was cheap enough though (yeah, you might
have guessed that would please me) well of course I bought it to give it
a try, didn't I, .... and was pleasantly surprised when I opened up the
box.
