Hatsune Miku Jagdtiger

I normally don't have much desire to model late war German armor, but when I first saw pictures of the Miku ita-tank displayed in Volks Hobby Square Osaka, I knew that one day I would have to make my own version in 1/72 scale.

I ended up buying two Trumpeter Jagdtigers (07293 and 07273) for my build because I wanted the Henschel suspension, but not the Zimmerit. Trumpeter does produce a kit of the version I wanted, but because these two kits were on sale, it was actually cheaper to buy two models, as opposed to one.

Below is a picture of the infamous Trumpeter Jagdtiger rear deck with inverted grills, where the fine detail will never be seen again once the hull is closed up.

The instructions say that the tracks can be glued with normal model cement. I found this to be untrue for liquid cement and CA glue, so I used my hot-knife to melt the tracks together.

To create some track sag, I drilled holes through the lower hull and used some pins to depress the track.

If I thought about this earlier, I would have pre-drilled the holes and used a single length of metal across the hull, but because I did it after the wheels and tracks were assembled, the holes were a bit random and I had to adjust the angles of the pins to even out the sag. The pins were later embedded in epoxy to ensure that they wouldn't come loose after I closed up the hull.

Sourcing the decals was the hardest part of this build. The Volks model uses 1/24 decals from Good Smile Racing, but obviously they wouldn't work for my 1/72 tank (not to mention this particular set runs for more than US$100 on the secondary market nowadays). Luckily, I came into possession of a Nendoroid Petit: Vocaloid RQ Set a couple of years back, which included decals that I could use for the tank. Additional decals from Easy Decal were found on eBay.

The decals for the sides were smaller than I would have liked, but they went on easily. The Volks tank bears the number "39" on it in a bit of word play, as the individual numbers can be pronounced "Mi-Ku". I decided to go with "808" in reference to the GSR sponsored BMW Z4 E86s used by Studie for the 2008 and 2009 Super GT seasons. The numbers were from a Fujimi Hetzer kit, but they were pretty old, and fragmented around the edges when I applied them.

The black numbers just looked too plain, so I removed them with some Scotch tape. I'll probably replace them with red numbers with white outlines. The tank still looks a bit underdecorated for an itasha. I'm going to have to look into adding some more bits of art onto it.