Tristar 2cm Flak 38 Late

[Jamie Tainton]

Here's something I was working on this weekend- just a little project to get in the swing.

[Markus Lack]

It´s a nice kit James, you will enjoy it.
I posted some pics of three 2cm Flak 38 in the walkaround section. They could be interesting for you .

[Jamie Tainton]

Here some sprue scans

[Jamie Tainton]

okay here is the first step or two in action- pretty basic assembly no problems encountered yet.




Here just a dry fit. I won't glue the gun part into the cradle part till after painting it a metallic colour as it would be very difficult to do that later if everything was together.




I will be replacing the kit's plastic barrel with one of Adler's nest's earlier releases, they have since released a better one, but since this will be mostly a OOTB build I'll not sacrifice one of those nicer ones just yet.




This is the PE that is included with the kit. I replaced the PE wing-nuts for some from Bronco, as you will see later.


This is where you can see I cocked it up a bit- I guess either the instructions aren't clear enough or I didn't read it right but suffice it to say the top of the circular mountings should be held off from being fitted till after the side walls have been pushed into their corresponding slots. It will prevent any damage as that is what happened to mine once I pushed down on them with my thumb. Also the way the shield mounts on the upper parts aren't in the right position in these pics, they need to be were the circular cotter pins are. I had to cut these off and remount them.




BTW this model does not allow for the barrel to move up and down- the angle of the gun is fixed. Some of the building is quite maddening. Parts A12 and A14 for example are shown to not need gluing in- but this is not gonna work- you need to glue them in place or they just fall out of their holes! You should not add the forward circular sight C-19 before you add part C-20 as I have done here. You need to add that part to get the right location on the part C-18. I put C-19 onto C-18 before doing this and had to shave it off later and refit everything. I also held back from adding the front tool box assembly to the frame till after both sides were in place. Make sure the box front face is straight up and down, this will be important later on when you go to affix the shields. I shaved off the mold line on the base as to my eye it didn't look right for the distinct weld bead that is apparent on photos of the real deal. I later will use stretched sprue to impart this look. Instead of using the two retained nuts A-8 provided by the kit I substituted ones from the Bronco line of aftermarket items.

[Luiz Carlos]

Hey James!

...nice start on this excelent model...anxious to see the next steps...how do you intend to make this one?...alone?...installed on a vehicle?(remmenber my Blitz? ...in a dio?...anyway,I´m sure it will a great one!

Regards my friend!

Luiz...my first post,here...

[Jamie Tainton]

Sorry for the delay Luiz, still getting use to the sytsem and all. This is just going to be a simple OOTB build to become more familiar with the gun. BTW I got some pics of the Blitz with the 38 from a Ground Power mag- unless you have them.
more work on this to show although there are two mistakes and some cleanup yet to do.






















Here the grey Bronco wingnuts make a nice upgrade from the flat PE ones that come with the kit.


here you can see the stretched sprue added to make the weld seen on the real gun platforms.












I painted the gun and with a dark metallic from Humbrol and decided to prime the rest of the platform with it to and buffed it all up.












Here it is beside an earlier version that is on my ongoing Flak Panzer I/A project

[Luiz Carlos]

Dear James.

I´m follwing this project with a big attention...I´m a fan of the Flak38...as you are seeing on the pA ...I like very much the weld seam on the flak pedestal...very well done ...and an excelent reference for the mine...

...Blitz w/Flak 38 pics from a Ground Power...great!...I don´t have it!...if possible I´d like very much to see them


Thanks for sharing!

Have a nice day!

Luiz.

[Jamie Tainton]

Thanks Luiz but this build is not really something I'll most likely be all that proud of- it's just a quick slap dash Out of the box build to get to understand what the details are of this gun and what I may have to do to achieve a more detailed result- and I will say at this point there is a fair amount of room to do some tweaking, which is the case with all model kits. But I really don't know much about this kit and or gun but I'm learning.
I ended up trying to do my old resist rubber stop out method on this kit but I ended up having to reverse and strip the three colour cammo with some oven cleaner, and then repaint. That's okay though as all that made me more familiar with how I will attack the next attempt.
Here you can see I have coated the dark metal colour and rubber stop out (vallejo) which are those little bumps.

[Zsolt Marvany]

Hello James,
I got one question: how did you mask the gun (and preserve it in its own nice gunmetal color) before painting the yellow ? Or no masking, simply removable?
thanks & cheers,
Zsolt

[Jamie Tainton]