COBI Trabant 601 Universal Feuerwehr Set 24555

COBI's Trabant 601 Universal Feuerwehr is a 1:35 model built from 77 blocks, 10 cm long, under licence, in fire service red with FEUERWEHR lettering and a roof beacon. The wheels turn on rubber tires and all markings are printed — no stickers. A brick with the car's name is included.

What the body was actually made of

The Trabant's bodywork is Duroplast, and the material is the most misunderstood thing about the car.

It is not plastic in the ordinary sense and it is certainly not cardboard, which is the joke everyone makes. Duroplast is a thermoset composite: cotton waste — the short fibres left over from Soviet textile mills — pressed with phenol resin under heat. The result is closer in principle to fibreglass than to anything else, with fibre providing the strength and resin holding it together.

East Germany used it because it had no steel to spare and plenty of access to Soviet cotton waste. It turned out to have real advantages: it does not rust, which is why so many Trabants survive, and the panels were reasonably resistant to knocks.

The drawback nobody solved was disposal. A thermoset cannot be melted down and reused the way steel or thermoplastic can, so after 1990 there were tens of thousands of Trabant bodies that could not be recycled by any normal means. Various schemes were tried, including bacterial digestion, and most of the problem was eventually solved by grinding them up as construction filler.

Some descriptions of the car claim Duroplast has a melting point similar to aluminium. It does not have a melting point at all — that is the defining property of a thermoset, and it is exactly why the disposal problem existed.

The car

The 601 was launched in 1964 and built until 1990 with very little change. Just over 100 km/h flat out, and a waiting list that ran to well over a decade — people put their children's names down at birth. The Universal is the estate version.

Specifications

Pieces: 77 · Scale: 1:35 · No stickers
Model dimensions: 10 × 5 × 4.5 cm (3.9 × 2.0 × 1.8 in)