I’ll start with a tip of my propeller beanie to Falconmod, whose (much finer) Trumpeter An-2 posted recently inspired me to pull out this old polystyrene coprolite from the height of the Cold War era.
This is the VEB-Plasticart 1/75 An-2, first produced in then-East Germany ca. 1961. As a kit it doesn’t have a lot to recommend it: blocky and ill-fitting parts, crude contours and a near-total absence of surface detail (save for an odd geometric waffle grid of prominent rivets which bear no relation to actual lines on the aircraft). On the plus side…it does actually seem to capture the solid truck-like appearance and stork-legged stance of the real thing fairly convincingly. As an added interest, the VEB offering represents a rare configuration of the widely-used and long-serving An-2 design: seven aircraft which the East Germans had modified from agricultural aircraft, fitted with large rectangular fuselage windows for use as light-duty civil transports.
Since that was the version represented in the kit, I opted to go with one of these aircraft operated by ‘Interflug,’ the DDR’s state airline, in the elegant eye-catching livery they wore in (I believe) the early-mid 60’s.
I added a basic cockpit and seat-shapes in the cabin from various near-scale leftovers from other builds. Externally the build was OOB, except for half-round ‘cylinders’ and sprue push-rods added to the flat-bottomed hole in the front of the engine cowling. Rigging and aerial wire are EZ-Line; decals were home-printed except for the DDR flags on the tail (which came from the antiquated kit decal-sheet…but which worked just fine, despite being close to four decades old).
Hardly a sterling replica, but a fun encounter with not-quite-state-of-the-art Eastern-European modeling technology. Hope you enjoy.
The kit falls solidly in that category of “I’m glad I didn’t toss it…but I’m equally glad I don’t have another one in the stash.” I actually think I got it as a ‘freebie’ included with another item, back in the early days of Ebay (when that was still a common ‘bonus.’)
Have to agree on the ‘scimitar’ style prop. Judging by photographs, it seems to have been either uncommon or short-lived (or both), but one can occasionally turn one up:
Since…going by the ‘tourist’ cabin widows…whoever made the molds seems probably to have been working from some images of the E. German machines (if not the real thing, in some sense), I suppose it’s possible they did actually have that funky propeller design–albeit a little less ‘clunky’ than the kit version! [:D]
Nice job! And very clean look, too! I’ve built two or threee of those back in the eighties. I was like nine or ten years old and An-2 was the first aircraft I have actually seen flying after I have built a model of. Many years later it also was the first (and only) aircraft I have jumped out of.
And did you know most of them An-2s were built in Poland? I’ve read about 11 950 aircraft built at tthe Mielec plant in Poland, that’s right, almost 12 thousand of them!
About the prop - it turns out it’s the initial propeller for the An-2, designated V-509-D7 and it’s got wooden blades. All the An-2s I’ve seen live had straight, aluminium-bladed props.
That is interesting that the An-2’s orginal propeller was curved - it looks like those composite blades modern aircraft use. Kind of like seeing a Ford Model T with a Tesla battery!
Oddly enough…within literally 3 hours of my posting the pics…I was watching some History Channel program that showed ‘generic airplane’ footage which (thanks to my earlier project-related photo-trawling) I happened to recognize as a Texas-based AN-2 operated for tourist and skydiving purposes.
Two weeks earlier, and I might not even have noticed what type of a/c it was!
