Jagdtiger Henschel Interior. Part I. The Firewall

The jagdtiger was the heaviest tank destroyer to see production during world war II. Its menacing hulk has long been a popular modeling subject. A couple of after market interior kits for the jagdtiger have been produced but in my opinion lacked in detail and overall "buildability". Using one of these kits, I started a little over a year ago to build a Porsche jagdtiger with interior. After six months of research, kit modification and scratch building efforts I realized that the time I was putting in would be better spent by starting from scratch. I contacted Brian from AM and the work started. After an additional 6 months of research and design we have finally arrived at a finished product. With nearly 500 metal and resin parts, we believe this to be not only an accurate replica of the jagdtiger interior but perhaps one of the most detailed and accurate interior kits available in 1/35th scale.

The purpose of this blog will be to show the kits highlights and to use it as a forum to discuss any of our research arriving at the design. I would like to state from the start that goal of this project was to produce a replica...not merely a model. I think those of you who decide to tackle this kit will find a challenging but well designed and buildable kit. The construction of the interior alone will take between 30-50 hours for the average advanced modeler. Parts we felt might be too time consuming and perhaps too difficult to reproduce were cast in resin. Once again, your efforts to build this as designed will be rewarded not with simply producing a model but a 1/35th scale replica of the jagdtiger interior.

I began with the intention of modeling the porsche vehicle. Early on from my efforts with the Dragon kit's roof, we realized that removing the roof and either replacing it with a resin one or trying to salvage the roof from the kit would be too difficult for most to attempt. For this reason, we redirected our efforts towards modeling the Henschel vehicle and chose the Tamiya kit with its removable roof. Admittedly, the tamiya kit has a quite a few undesirable ejection marks throughout the interior and the roof has to be reworked a bit but overall it provides a great base for building a Henschel vehicle with a highly detailed interior.

The first portion of the kit we would like to highlight is the firewall. Both of the prior kits and indeed my first efforts at scratchbuilding were based solely on the King tiger references. The more I delved into reference photos it became obvious that there were distinct differences. For instance, unlike the King Tiger, the jagditger was far too heavy to ford rivers so there was no need for the wheel on the firewall of the King tiger to close the engine deck for fording. Also, the sides of the King tiger were occupied by the dominant ammunition racks so the components of the wall were compressed towards the center. In contrast, the jagdtiger had more room along the sides and the components a bit more spread out. Photographs from Devey's two volume set, the surviving Kubinka and Aberdeen vehicles and many other references were used to arrive at the final product.

King Tiger Firewall:

Locations of electrical components in King Tiger (left) vs. Jagdtiger (right):

Fire Extinguisher Details:

As you can see from the photo below, with the exception of the hinge pin for the engine hatch, everything is in brass. In the actual kit, the fan body, the fuel lines and some of the stacked components of the firewall will be given in resin for the reasons stated earlier.