Your work looks always impressive Micehl @michel-verschuere
Like Morne @mornem said, this Flak will be an absolute winner.

Looking really impressive, my friend @michel-verschuere!
Extremely accurate, all seems perfectly aligned.

Looking ABSOLUTELY gorgeous, @michel-verschuere!

Here are some pics in daylight so you can see the color better

Looks close to what most journals described although the dated picture material I have looks more dark in B/W.

Happy modeling! Michel.

Very nice looking in daylight, Michel @michel-verschuere

This brings back memories! Some time ago I made a trip out to Vienna while I was stationed at Ramstein AB to see the sights and while making my way through the Augarten I came across this enormous structure which took my breath away - I had never read up on Flakturms before so I didn't know anything about them before. I happened across an older gentlemen and his wife in the park and asked them about this Flak tower. Come to discover he and his wife were both kids when the Russians came, and one of the first things they did was fill up the first floor of this 'thing' with a haul of dynamite to demolish it (apparently they angled the guns downward from the tower and were picking off Russian tanks during the early part of the battle). They lit the fuse, took off like hell, and when the dynamite blew it 'lifted' the tower up off the ground 6 feet, and knocked out every good window for about 3 square miles! Frustrated, the Russians didn't attempt it again, hence the reason its still standing there. I don't know if that's true or not, I only know what they told me, is all... but that does sound like a pretty incredible story. I'm really looking forward to seeing your model completed - I can tell you've got a lot of time wrapped up in this already.

Hi everyone! @fiveten, @lgardner, @holzhamer, @johnb, @luftfanatic Glad you like it so far.

Today I covered the structure in a silk dullcote (acrylic) from the rattle can. I added the few decals yesterday and so the dullcote sealed them in place.

I now turned to the ammo elevator. In this dio, I insert the elevator armored top where the spent shells were deposited and rolled back to the magazine in the interior of the tower for re-use. There was a larger ammo elevator top where the live shells where brought to the roof, but I decided against building that one to keep the composition (and size of the dio) within limits.
Here is the book exempt I based myself upon to draw the ammunition elevator top:

You can see the elevator top in the following pictures:


And here is a shot from the top when it was lifted on top of one of the towers:

Must have been a heavy door...

In any case the steel was 30-50 cm thick, the reason being that one lucky bomb drop in the ammo shaft would trigger a magazine explosion in the interior of the tower. Since the flak towers had other functions too like hospitals and air raid shelters, these shafts were protected by thick, tensile steel that would detonate every one-in-a-million bomb hit prior to doing more damage below deck.

I drew this ammo elevator top in openScad, then cut it up and sent it to a 3D prining service provider. I have a 3D printer myself but since the thing is at least 6 years old, I can't keep up with the current standard and especially with the ever increasing definition. Here are some makerpictures:

Here is the result, it's pure scratch (other than that the main shape was drawn and 3D printed)



Today I assembled the parts of the ammo top and sanded everything smooth. The last word about 3D printing and its role in our hobby has definitely not been said but it is an illusion to think that every 3D printed shape exits the printer ready to use. You need a lot of cleaning, sanding and smoothening afterwards, this time it was no different. The material I had the shapes printed in was polyamide, white base.

Because this elevator top was cast, the surface will be left rough, I plan to apply a layer of Mr. Surfacer 1000 to do just that. I also worked on the weld seems using stretched sprue. Looks ok to me.
I'm quite pleased by the result, what du you guys think?

Happy modeling! Michel.