| Attention VEB Plasticart Airplane Kit Collectors and Russian Civil Aviation Enthusiasts! |
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| A beautifully assembled Plasticart 1/100 scale Tupolev TU-114 model kit from the former East German Democratic Rupublic. |
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| This model dates from 1976, and was recently assembled by me, straight from the box according to the directions. Plasticart kits normally included a vial or tube of liquid cement and silver paint, but I chose to paint the undersides and flight surfaces with Tamiya gloss aluminum for quality. This kit looks identical to the one pictured on the cover of the 1974 VEB Plasticart catalog. |
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| Dimensions: Fuselage length - 15.5 inches; wingspan - approximately 23 inches; height (bottom of tires to tip of vertical stablizer - 5 inches. |
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| This is gorgeous model! This is one of Plasticart's early kits which was produced from the early sixties to the mid-seventies. This particular model you are looking at is probably one of the last in the production run. Like other early Plasticart models, it does not have a display stand, but included plasticene for nose weight. Also, each passenger window had to be glued in place separately, instead of a window strip. The decals, over thirty years old, went on nicely - a real tribute to Plasticart's quality. I have built many Plasticart kits over the years and find the durability and quality of the decals to be their finest attribute. |
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| A big fan of these models wrote in to give a little history of the airplane: |
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| This is the first Prototype of the Tupolev Tu-114 (NATO Codename: 'Cleat'), CCCP-L5611 from 1957. This was the plane that carried Nikita Khrushchev to USA in 1959 where the famous shoe incident happened. Now it is on display at the Monino Museum (Russia). |
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I think that this prototype had a shorted fuselage length (47,2 m) from the commercial series (54,1 m). |
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You can see this information on the instructions sheet, too. (47,2 cm -> 1:100 scale). |
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| Don Richard |
