Hello everyone.

Working on a dio and have come across a minor detail problem: how does one show a spiked 37mm Flak gun? The dio plans show the gun has been abandoned, and I can't figure out for the life of me how to show this. Any suggestions?

Split the barrel muzzle like a banana?

If you can , watch episode 2 of Band of Brothers where Easy company attack and spike several guns


Ian

As this was somewhat of my military specialty (SEAL Demolition Team), there are several things that can be done.

Much spiking of artiliary was simply to drill a large hole into the barrel in a low visability spot... if the enemy tries to use the gun again, it will kill everyone in the vacinity as the discharge will erupt the barrel and send fragments flying far and wide. Still - this may be hard to portray in scale.

One method is to drop a small charge into the barrel. When detonated, it expands and bends the barrel, rather than discharging through the barrel tip. This could be portrayed by making a bulge in the middle of the barrel, with perhaps a slight tear in the barrel where the bulge appears.

A final method was to simply dump quick cure cement into the barrel. A quart or two of concrete cures quickly, and will totally disable the firing mechanism and trajectory path of any shell, usually resulting in another explosion in situ. Again - hard to show unless you were to portay the demo team actually pouring the concrete into the barrel.

to spike the gun you are talking about, I think this is the way I would go about doing it...

Remove the kit barrel or at least the end part of it and replace it with a brass tube. Cut the brass tube to the size you need, for the section to be replaced. Take a nail that is slightly larger than the inside of the tube, but which the point will still fit into the brass tube. When the nail is forced into one end it will split. If needed score the tube with multiple scores to weaken the brass and to ensure the tube will split with the desired effect. you could do this by nipping the end of the tube with small wire cutters.

Good Luck

Paul

If the gun has been disabled by it's crew before being abandoned, the usual way with a modern piece was to remove the firing pin mechanism from the breech block. This doesn't actually completely disable the gun, but renders it useless to any enemy likely to come across it in the short term, & it doesn't take very long when you're in a hurry. To depict it you would just need to drill out the breech block with a pin chuck, the details would depend on the gun.

Thanks Keith. I didn’t have any idea just drilling a hole in a gun tube would cause a catastrophic failure.


Shaun

I am assuming this is caused by a catastrophic escape of pressure from the controlled explosion of firing the gun? Closest thing I can think of to compare this is not having a rifle bolt properly sealed. The resulting escape of gas blows outward in a direction that people (you) are standing around.

Jeff