Hi guys, I'm trying to build a Flak 38 with it's dio for about 8 months for the blitz Italy campaign but I don't find the time anywhere to continue the build seriously. It's a little bit normal that I miss time because I'm 14 y.o. so I go to school and I have a lot of builds at the same time. But now the number of builds downed and I don't go to school for the sumer so I want to restart the build seriously. I'm searching plans of the Flak 38 to scratch the armor plates because their not realistic on the Italeri model. I want to make them out of brass sheet or plasticard but i don't know which one is the best for that application.

Gabriel

Do you mean the 2cm Flak 38? I would do plastic sheet -- simpler and easy to toss out and try again if you make a mistake.

Just use the Italeri ones as a template -- you'll be fine.

Yes it's the 2cm version.
Thanks

Gabriel

If you wanted to cheat Gabriel this will help you out alot

http://www.luckymodel.com/scale.aspx?item_no=35527

Eduard PE set for the 20mm Flak 38

Phill

Gabriel;

Hi!

Building that old Italeri kit? Well... I just recently did the old old Tamiya kit (bought it back in 1973..., so I KNOW it's elderly!). It too came with some horribly thick plastic shields.

I did go down the scratch - from -styrene sheet route - and it's actually pretty easy, at least to get a good basic form. But adding on the rivets and stuff turned out to be a bigger chore than I thought reasonable, so I changed course in mid - build...

This could work for you: I found that I could take my Exacto #11 knife and gently scrape away around all those slightly-tapered edges to get a much thinner look, and also thin back the shields to reduce the obvious edge-tapering as seen on the kit-parts. After some careful scraping, I kept all the details in place and got a pretty good-looking reasonably thin set of shields out of it. In the end, the thinned old Tamiya shields compare favorably with the styrene shields in the current Dragon Flak 38 and Tristar Late production Flak 38 - both of which are otherwise light-years ahead of that old Tamiya beast!

Just a thought - it's easier than scratching the whole set, looks good enough to win a first at a few shows (on a Horch 1A), and is way cheaper than those cool PE things!

Just as a reference... Here's a pic of my old Tamiya gun mounted on a DAK 1942 Horch 1A. I did scratch brass-basket and a bunch of detail bits, but actually this old gun kit is not bad as it goes (save for shields about 2 scale inches thick!):



Maybe give it a try?

Cheers!

Bob

thanks guy for the comments

Phill: The pe set looks really nice but I already bought over than 35$ of aftermarrket stuff for the dio so I will try to do it for the less money possible. I didn't know that this old kit had a pe set.

Bob: I tryed to do exactly what you did but the italeri kit is even worse than tamiya's one: it looks like a aa gun with a tiger armor and their is lots of ejector pin marks so I have to remake it entirely. I just bought that kit because it was 4$ but finally, it's a pack of problems to do. Do you know what size of plasticard that you did used when you tried it because it can be very usefull?

Thanks

Gabriel

Gabriel;

I went and looked at one of those Italeri kits in my stash - a Flak 38 on a half-track... Sd.Kfz.10/4 or /5 - and yeah, those shields would work for a Tiger!

OK - I wanted "thin" and went with Evergreen's 0.010 styrene sheet. This would equate with a shield about 1/35 scale 0.35 US Inch, or about 9mm, thick. If you want a little more robustness, use the 0.015 sheet, but I think the 0.010 sheet would be closest to the real thing. Either sheet will come across very very nicely when tricked-out with the rivets, etc. - the more so because there will be no tapered edges and thickly-armored middles!

As suggested earlier this thread, use your Italeri shields as templates for the shapes. IF you shave those rivets off them, you can use those to "decorate" your new Evergreen plate. The trick to getting those rivets into the right locations is to draw or photo the originals so you have a handy reference pic to look at as you transfer bits.

PS: I wish I had stuck to it and completed the scratch shields for my posted gun - in the end, I put a lot of time into fiddling other details on it and adding a metal barrel... it would have been worth the extra effort to complete the shields... I saved them and will use them on some future build!

Take your time, be patient, and Good Luck! Hope to see your gun posted when done!

Cheers!

Bob

Thanks, this info will help a lot. For the rivets, it's sure that I find some pictures to help me. It's sure that I will post pictures of the dio when finished.

Thanks

Gabriel