Elefant Info

[Dave Jones]

For practical reasons I won't be starting any serious work on my Elefant until Spring next year, so I am contenting myself with researching the vehicle and gathering as much data as I can. Unfortunately I'm finding that there is simply not the volume of material out there as there is for say, Tiger & Panther etc. So my idea with this topic is to use it as a depository for any info or observations that we think may be useful to fellow builders. I'm not particularly thinking about the Armourtek kit builds themselves (individual observations, comments & suggestions get dealt with in separate topics) but information on the actual vehicles. There will never be more than 75 of us (actually 74 Steve is doing two, greedy bugger ) buliding the Elefant so I think sharing info may prove useful.

So as a start, he's a first bit of Elefant info to get the topic started:

I have chosen (rather predictably) to build '102' as she would have appeared in the weeks before capture. From phtographs it is clear that 102 (along, I presume with the other vehicles in the same unit) has Zim applied to the top surfaces of the hinged front mudguards. Most Elefants don't appear to have Zim on these areas. At the time of capture the Zim on the right mudguard was all present, but that on the left has a significant amount missing stretching back about 10" from the leading edge.

[Dave Jones]

For those builders planning to add Zim to their Elefants, which I suspect is most of us, I've just come across this rather interesting photograph which clearly shows the Zim applied in a pattern with the texture running vertically and not horizontally as one would expect to see. The photo claims the vehicle to be from sPzJagAbt 653 sometime during 1944. Whether there were variations in application at the factory or if this was a field re-application I don't know. It's interesting either way.

[mark lawson]

if you want to studs pictures of the Elefant then you could do no better than finding a copy of "Combat history of Scwere Panzerjager Abteilung 653" this was the only Abteilung with Elefant, if you want to studs the earlier Ferdinand then the same book applies along with "Combat history of Scwere Panzerjager Abteilung 654" the latter Abteilung later transferred to Jagdpanther.