The Maus was a German World War Two super heavy tank that was completed in late 1944. Five were ordered, but only two hulls and one turret were completed before the testing grounds were captured by advancing Soviet forces It is the heaviest fully enclosed armoured fighting vehicle ever built at 188 metric tons. It was armed with a 128mm gun and a coaxial 75mm gun. The Maus was intended to punch holes through enemy defences in the manner of an immense “breakthrough tank”, whilst taking almost no damage to any components.
I’ve always been impressed with the 1/100th scale models from Zvezda as well as being good quality plastic miniatures they are also reasonably priced. I was intrigued to see that my local model shop had the German super heavy tank Maus in their range of Zvezda kits.
I think it might have been priced wrongly at £3.50 as similar boxes (i.e. the bigger boxes) were £7.00. So I bought two for potential objectives or models for alternate history games set at the end of World War Two.
The model comprises two plastic sprues and look detailed and I think it will capture the feel of this monstrous tank.
The sprues have sat around for a while, but having recently purchased a similar 1/100th scale 15mm Maus from Battlefront I was intrigued to see the comparison.
The next stage was to construct the models, even though it says snap-fit, decided to glue the model together. I was going add some weight to the model too, so give it some heft and ballast. I think a super heavy tank, even at 1/100th scale, should be “super heavy”. However, I didn’t have any weights to hand. The model was not as simple as I thought it would be to construct, I had issues with getting the gun the right way around, but got there in the end.
This is a large 15mm model, as compared to the M18 Hellcat in the same scale.
The next stage was a white undercoat.
One thought on “Constructing and undercoating the Maus”