I am working on the final details before assembly. Yay!
I painted a few small details on the plane, and prepared the last, tiny components. I have a Russian Po-2 pilots operating handbook somewhere, I should look up why it has so many Venturi tubes. Two of them seems to be a combined Venturi-Pitot tube, the other smaller one a simple Venturi tube. I guess the two combined ones are for the speed/altimeter/VSI on the two instrument panels, but I wonder what the third one did. Did the Po-2 had basic gyro instruments by default, and that tube was used to drive those instruments? It would be an interesting thing to investigate, since I still have two other Po-2 kits waiting for assembly. I want to modify one of those kits as single seat crop duster, and I have seen on the reference photos, that some details (such as the number of these tubes) are different compared to the standard version.
I have to replace the parallel struts of the horizontal stabiliser with a metal or plastic starch built version. These were poorly made in the kit, and was impossible to clean without breaking them. Luckily, I have a lot of styrene and metal rods in my spares box.
Memories are also coming back, the first time I have seen a Po-2 flying was in 1996. Our local flying club hosted the European championships in glider aerobatics, and we organised a small GA airshow on the last day. All of us volunteered for working during the championship and the airshow, and we had great time, living in the airport for two weeks, and working from early morning until the late evening. The organisers managed to get some cool GA planes for the final airshow, so we could see an An-2 towing 5 gliders simultaneously, a glider lifted up by a helicopter and released a few hundred meters high to make aerobatics, and a few classic planes as well - including a Po-2 in flying conditions. I remember that I really wanted to take a few photos of it, so I asked the guys to cover me for 15 minutes and ran to the runway when we heard the typical sound of the old plane approaching. Well, I was used to faster planes, and I managed to get to runway way before the Po-2 arrived… 🙂 It was much slower than I expected.
However, it was great to see it in real life. It was surprisingly agile in the air, despite its age and modest engine power. I can try to find the old photos, but I am not sure if I have them in digitalised format.