But back to what really counts - construction.
To rig this vessel proved to be a hard nut to crack...
I usually rig my ships using stretched sprue exclusively which gave me much experience with this method over the years.
However I found that sometimes my rigging, especially the signal halyards, is not thin enough and the lines that are really fine tend to be extremely fragile. I found it quite difficult to keep the halyards taut and parallel - I fit them in pairs, like on real ships.
I began to experiment with other materials such as lycra and Caenis.
The former was used for the signal halyards.
The first try failed: the lines pulles out from WEM's lycra were no thinner than my usual stretched sprue and they exerted considerable tension on the yard, breaking it off repeatedly. The yard had not been soldered but this was never a problem with stretched sprue. With the build being in an advanced state I could not think of soldering and had to reinforce the joint with two-component epoxy. The yards inevitably became irregularly thicker which remains an unsightly detail even though I tried to make it less evident by painting darker shades on the underside of them.
Besides, I thought it wise to counterbalance the downward pull of the halyards with lifts out of Caenis which is much stronger than stretched sprue.
The second attempt of making halyards was more successful - another skein of lycra (also from WEM) behaved differently and it wasn't difficult to pull individual and very thin lines out of it.
Despite that it took me more than two weeks to finish this stage.
On one side the thicker, on the other then thinner halyards can be seen:
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On a side note it's hard to paint lycra but I had to give them a shade of brown-beige being signal halyards.
The rest of the rigging is mixture of stretched sprue and Caenis - the latter was used for the dressing lines, which being long, were always prone to sag or being damaged when made out of stretched sprue.
Then came the though part: cage aerials.
I tried my best to make them subtle and have to say that I failed.
David Griffith calles them the Holy Grail of modelmaking and advises to use lycra for the longitudinals.
I found it impossible to do in this build as the cage aerials are not continuous between two hard points and lycra needs to be pulled thight. I used stretched sprue instead and not the finest I could pull because a simple jig was utilesed to fabricate the aerials and even this way they were slightly damaged during handling (the longer aerial is 8 cm long!).
Tiger had late-war type, small diameter aerials in the period depicted and this fact didn't make my job easier at all.
First, really fine wire had to be used for the spacers and there's a lot of them.
A picture helps to understand why I have opted for scratchbuilding the spacers instead of using ones of the WEM set:
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(Here the contruction method can be seen: the spacer rings had been glued to two lines of stretched sprue,
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then blocks have been attached to the jig and two more lines placed above them completed the assembly)
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Second, the small diameter and big number of spacers made the aerial look "dense" despite my effort to produce something really fine.
Third, the spacers had to be painted black which thickened the whole assembly further.
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While still on the jig I pulled three of the lines together to form a cone - this is how the cage aerials end.
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It was a real pain to attach the aerials - their positioning means that this job is not for beginners.
(note how they are attached to the yard)
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To align both sides and fix the after aerial was another test of my dexterity.
In all, I am quite dissatisfied with how they turned out: too evident, too thick and grossly oversize.
I'm sure Jim Baumann would agree. I just could not leave them out and still cheated with their diameter
(one with the right diameter would have looked even denser with the lines being closer together).
I guess at present this is as the best I can do
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the rigging is simply spectacular 
