Hello again folks!

While I'm waiting for goodies to show up for various builds, I thought I would try out the whole build log thing. This will be my first one, so please don't expect too much on this one. I'll try to show and explain as much as I can. I will also be taking photos at my bench as opposed to my home made booth set up. It wouldn't be practical time wise to set it up and tear it down every time I needed to snap a pic. So, apologies in advance for the not so great photos. Hopefully they will be good enough to see what I'm showing.

So, on to the build. As the title says, I will be building an Opel Blitz Flak truck using the Tamiya Opel Blitz kit no. 35291 for the truck and a Tristar's Flak 38 Early kit no. 35037 for the shoot 'em up bit.
I "plan" on making this all out of the box. Both kits, from what I understand, are decent enough to do so. I may, however, decide to replace a thing or two here and there at some point. It just depends on what I think of the kit parts.

I do have a question for the astutely minded.... As I haven't been able to find any info on how a field mod flak would have been mounted, does anyone have a clue? I know Masterpiece has the flak sled available, but was there more than one way to skin the proverbial cat? I just don't know enough about the two to figure out a way to mount it that would make sense......Any help on that would be great!



Ok, I'm starting with the truck in the same spot as the instructions.
The Chassis:
Step one consists of 6 pieces. The frame, bottom half of the gas tank, bottom half of the engine/transmision(which is all you get with the kit btw, no full engine to display) and a couple of other fittings.


At the very least I will sand of the mold seam on the outside of the frame rails that's typical of every model that has a frame that I've ever seen. I say at the very least because the outside of the frame will be partially visible after completion, where the inside of the frame rails will not.


That's as far as I've gotten with it today.
How's that for a first timer?
Stay tuned, there's more to come!........sooner or later


Thanks,
Clint

Looks good so far, I'll be watching this. I'm planning on something similar, but will be using a Dragon Jaboschrek 38/103 mounted on the back

Thanks Andrew, I just hope it doesn't bore everyone to death!
I'll keep my eyes open for your build. I love the field mod type ideas!


Clint

As far as mounting it goes I recently did an Opel with a mortar mounted in the back and while researching photos of how it might be mounted ( it was to be a DAK vehicle ) it seems that at least as far as DAK field mods went anything that worked was good. But overall I found three methods I could identify.

One was more permanent and consited of a sort bar over the rear arm and a long bar across both the front arms of the lafette. These were a horizontal bar with long bolts either side of the arms going down through the deck.

A less common one appeared to be blocks of wood into which the three round feet sat with a steel locking pieces across each foot, and in at least one photo these locking bars held in place by a padlock.

The third which I only found one example of had the feet and their screws removed and a large bolt passed through the screw hole and through the deck and what appeared to be a large block of wood under the deck.

At least as far as DAK vehicles went the one thing I did notice was that there did appear to be an effort to not modify either the truck or the gun any more than need be. Though I couldn't say if this was to allow them to be easily returned to their original state or because it was just the easiest way to mount them with the least ammount of work involved.

Thanks for the info Dean! I kinda figured that simple=better in this type of situation.


Hopefully I'll have a little more to show tonight.


Clint

This sounds like it's going to be a fun build Clint. General rule of thumb with field mods = necessity + ingenuity = fast and simple. There really is no right or wrong way to do this as long as you are not modeling this after a specific documented vehicle. Dean has some good info for us here, and Sheperd Paine addressed a couple of field mods that mounted flak guns to Horch and Opel chassis' in his book on modeling military armor. If you want to check out some of the pics then let me know and I could fire you off an email with some scans.

Hey Jeremy, thanks for stopping by! I'm definately looking forward to it. I'll just have to decide how I'm gonna mount it and then figure out what scheme I want to to go with.
I have a much clearer idea on how to mount it now so it should be no problem to make it happen.

Clint

Sounds good Clint. Make sure you provide a way for the vehicle to stow ammo and any other necessary items such as fuel cans, etc.

I'm glad you mentioned that Jeremy. I somehow managed to leave ammo storage off the ole to do list!


Clint

I'm working on something similar with the Dragon Flak 38 and a few extra parts from the spares box. The wood block idea is good, but also I've seen the carriage on 3 metal plates bolted to the truck bed. That's what I'll be doing.

Clint: Sure thing my good man. It's something that tends to be a common "oops" in most people's flak conversions.

Kevin: That's what I am going to do with mine I think, or maybe use some rebar instead of metal plates. They're all sound ideas for mounting one's AA of choice.

You guys have reminded me that I was going to do a Jaboschreck conversion on an Opel Maultier or Steyr RSO chassis. DML makes a great kit of this AA if any of you are interested in going that route.

Moving right along on this build.
I decided to stop the play by play feel of what I started. I'm sure you all don't want to know what the steps are in the instructions or how pieces are required in each step.
The chassis is complete( the wheels are poly capped so I can pull them off before paint). No problems to report as of yet. It's exactly what I would expect from anything recent of Tamiya. It really almost falls together. As I'm not putting any aftermarket or scratch work into this one, it's going quite fast( for me anyways).
The leaf springs, well, any leaf springs for that matter are the bane of my exisitence. I'm not sure why exactly. I guess its just all the little spots that have a mold seam to be removed. It's such a pain.....
The from suspension is moveable if care is taken during construction. It's a pretty basic set up of parts. The "spindles" are sandwiched between two identical parts A13. Then a steering ling for lack of a better word snaps onto the spindles to keep them aligned. the exhaust is one piece that seems a tad small to me? It is nice however that the end is already drilled out. It's not very deep so I will probably make it a tad deeper.
Enough of my babbling and on to the pics.


I may not take a whole lot of pics on this build because as I said, it's going to be pretty much box stock and this my first build log. So I'm just trying to get a feel for how it all works.That, and I'm still trying to get used to using my camera at the bench. Ok, I'm really done babbling now.







That's all for now peeps. Until next time.

Thanks,
Clint

Great subject to model Clint.....any more updates?

I would recommend you get an aluminum gun barrel for the Flak, looks much better., but that's up to you of course.

Waiting for more pics......

Paul

Hi Paul, unfortunately, no updates at the moment. Work, family, distractions of other projects...etc, etc. I think we all know the drill
I plan to get some more work done this week, hopefully starting today after work but who knows?
I have thought about replacing the barrel, even though the one in the kit doesn't look horribly bad overall. I'll definately keep it in mind. I have plans to eventually do a similar build with loads more detail so I may wait and put a barrel in that one. We shall see.
As soon as I have some progress to show, I'll be sure and get it on ASAP!

Thanks,
Clint