HAUSSER
Super Constellation
John Burns lists a HAUSSER Super
Constellation in his aircraft plastic kit
directory PAK-20 [1]. This entry immediately
aroused my interest. I never heard of a
HAUSSER plastic kit wheras this manufacturer is well known to me
for his so called Elastolin figures, which I had as a child in about the
end of the 50´s/early 60´s. These figures
made from a mixture of clay, saw dust and
glue were amomg
others red indians, knights , castles,
and appropriate dioramas.
I did not find any information neither in
the internet nor in printed media. So I
started a search in
 .
with the keywords hausser and
constellation .The first hit came in
April 2006 , but not for the kit but a
boarding game from HAUSSER . Its name is
Flug um die Welt
(Flight around the World) and
it deals with arline flying. The gane
figures were Super Constellations.
Nontheless I bid and won as the seller
presented a picture which shows a sort of
Constellation kit. I assumed it was a
catalog.
In fact it was the inside page of the cover
from a game flight ticket.
This page is pictured above in a bigger
scale. A detail of the inside of the rear
cover is depicted right. It shows that the
upper fuselage could be opened to show the
interior.
It was confirmed now that a HAUSSER kit
really existed.
What was still not clear to me if it was a
platsic kit. The parts did not come on at a
sprue but seemed to be fastened as single
items in the box. That reminds me more to
metal kits
that were offered for example by SCHUCO in
the fifties or earlier. |
An interesting feature of the board game was
the remark I found in the gaming instruction
which is printed on the inside of the box
top. It says (my translation):
The SUPER CONSTELLATION pictured on the
game-box currently is the most
beautiful and most modern airliner of the
world . It is offered by us as a kit
via toy dealers in a scale matching
a HO train. Wing span is about 43 cm (=
37,25 m in large-scale technology).
So the scale, should be 1:87.
In 2007, 2008 and 2009 the real
Constellation kit was offered in
always by the same seller. He claimed the
three copies originated from the
company archive which has been closed down
after the bankruptcy of HAUSSER in 1983.
The first went for EUR 1,239.-
(I repeat in words:one thousend two
hundred). I did not store data for the other
auctions but I ´m quite shure they went for
more than EUR 500.-
Too expensive foer me just for satisfying my
historical curiosity so i did not buy one.
At least I had a better impression how the
parts looked like.
The pictures from the seller confirmed the
character of the parts as seen in the
leaflet shown above.
My impression of metal parts even was
enhanced especially as they were
pre-colored.
Sadly the seller never answered my question
about the material the kit was made from.
|
