Savoia Marchetti S.79 Corsa completed

  

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:

http://wingsofintent.blogspot.com/2014/09/172-scale-siai-s79-corsa-conversion.html

-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:

http://wingsofintent.blogspot.com/2015/04/savoia-s79-corsa-adaptation-from-172nd.html