Jump to content

Savoia Marcehtti S.79 Corsa, conversion of the 1/72 Italeri kit


Recommended Posts

A build from 4 years ago:

 

The S.79 Corsa I-13 (radio call I-FILU) was flown by the team Fiori-Lucchini in the Istres-Damascus-Paris race to a second place.

You may acquire Paolo Maina's book, "Lost Archives: A Pictorial History of SIAI - Chapter 1: Sorci Verdi", if you are interested in an accurate conversion and a juicy history and technical aspects, coupled with great illustrations and photos.

-The Italeri kit is a pleasure to work with, the type of plastic used is among the best I ever dealt with, but the kit suffers of starvation, and the effect of the stringers and tail ribs is out of proportion. Putty and sanding will help, something you have to do anyway to hide the windows and door. Re-skinning is what I would do if I build another, much simpler and time effective.

-Neither the Italian Wings nor the Pavla sets are totally accurate. They help, but unfortunately contain errors that you will have to correct (and redundancies in the case of the Pavla parts).

- I chose the front/aft fuselage sub-assemblies approach to re-join the separated parts, because the more traditional approach of re-joining a whole left and right sides to be later glued together may have introduced minute differences in length that would have translated in a fore or aft mismatch, or even a banana fuselage. Aligning is critical, and much measuring and dry-fitting should be done to ensure a true fuselage. Having used the wing itself to "true" the fuselage front long "tails" (karmans) I was sure that I had a good chance of getting it right. The aft fuselage left and right halves lock themselves properly by kit's engineering default.

-Whatever machine you are planning to model, study photos. Drawings, profiles, "artistic" renditions are all ok, but only an interpretation of reality. Photos instead depict a reality (although beware of wrong captions on the Internet, so abundant unfortunately).

-Work carefully, patiently, joyfully.

-And lastly...if you do not feel up to the challenge this time or you perceive it as too daunting...good news: you can still have your racer. There was another racer (S.79K) that participated in the Istres-Damascus-Paris raid that was a slightly modified production machine, with hunch and all (armament deleted). It requires minimum modifications, although of course still needs the proper livery. This machine was I-ROTR, flown by Rovis and Trimboli, race number I-12.

 

 

92.jpg

 

95.jpg

 

93.jpg

 

98.jpg

 

99.jpg

 

991.jpg

 

993.jpg

 

994.jpg

 

996.jpg

 

997.jpg

 

998.jpg

 

999.jpg

 

999e.jpg

 

999d.jpg

 

IMG_4943+(1280x976).jpg

 

IMG_4945+(1280x978).jpg

 

Edited by Moa
  • Like 17
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...