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.
These are some notes that if read together with what I
already wrote in the step-by-step posting, will provide a guide and hopefully
some light on the road if you are pursuing this conversion:
-You may acquire Paolo Maina's book, 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 amongst 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 subassemblies 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.
(I made this latter, easier conversion starting with the less-desirable
Airfix kit; you can see it here:
A very well research subject, congratulations. Armando Gil.
ReplyDeleteGracias Armando!
Deletenádherné...
ReplyDeletea ta barevná kombinace jim opravdu sluší :-)
Translation:
Delete"wonderful ...a color combination that really suits them:-)"
Thanks Petr!
A really beautiful airplane, congratulations!
ReplyDeleteThe detailed photos (including the vintage ones) are just icing on the cake.
Thanks Erno!
DeleteBeautiful, Claudio. Such nice modelling.
ReplyDeleteThanks, John, you are kind indeed.
Delete