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One of the greatest pleasures that this hobby has for me is to turn bad things into good things. To take a kit that leaves much to be desired, and make it into something better, gives me a lot of satisfaction. So: bad things into good things, which is why I long wanted to convert a despicable thing with hateful, totalitarian symbols and more than obscure intentionality into something of a better nature, in this case an airliner. Over the years I gathered references about machines that operated in Switzerland, Australia, South Africa, Bolivia and Chile, noticing the differences among them. Long ago fellow modeler and friend Sönke from Marzipanland sent the old Italeri kit, to be rescued. It long sat in a deep and forgotten crag in the garage. I knew of the Kora conversion sets to adapt the Italeri kit to these civil versions. They include resin parts and decals. I was never tempted, neither by their quality nor by their price. The resin parts are somewhat heavy and coarse, feeling heavy-handed. The decals do not strike me as fine products either. Still -and as I am often forced to say- who else is going to provide these after market accessories to satisfy the needs of a small group of modelers wishing to represent lesser known types? so we accept what we get with a -somewhat reluctant- thank you. I plainly discarded the Lufthansa version, just a cosmetic half-disguise of its true intentions and nature, and sooner the Swiss version too, having seen it quite often modeled. My attention turned towards the Australian version, registered VH-UYA, which has an interesting story. I was able to gather some reasonable material, discovering in the process that some renditions of it (drawings and models) steered quite far away from reality, mostly regarding the colors of the plane, but that's a story for another time. None of the mentioned versions needs burdensome kit alterations. But some of the machines operating in South America (Lloyd Aéreo Boliviano and LAN of Chile) had Pratt and Whitney engines. That's what one of the Kora after-market products offers, then: one set of the new engines, cowls and nacelles, and the decals for those two planes. LAN actually had four JU-56Zs, from 220 to 223, but Kora only provides regs for one: 220. This, therefore, will involve some deep surgery, and the usual addition of some details missing in the kit, which provides an open cabin door... to no interior other than bulkheads and cockpit. It seems Italeri thought that the passengers just floated around the cabin, or hanged from straps, underground-wise. Cheeky monkeys, passenger plane without seats. This was, of course, an afterthought, a mold adaptation to squeeze more copies off the military molds. When I say "rescued" kit, I mean it: The kit had endured the "Igor" treatment, thus we have some parts already glued that shouldn't have been, raised panel lines erased -unfortunately before using them as guides to trace the engraved ones-, sections of the fuselage excised following and ebil plan that was left like Beethoven's 10th symphony, and so on so forth. As it stands, it looks like a post-apocalyptic gathering of plastic. Another wonderful aspect of my subject choice is that only a few, bad images can be found on the Net of it, which invariably makes things so much more interesting. And so we start: