(The completed model is here):
https://wingsofintent.blogspot.com/2020/02/savoia-s65-schneider-cup-modified.html
This is not a new kit on the market, so I won't be doing a full review, just stating some impressions and making some comments.
This is my first Karaya
kit, a brand I stayed away so far due to their prices, however justified
they may be due to the medium and the quality.
The molding looks good, no pinholes, bubbles or blobs, parts being
crisp and with reasonable pouring blocks that seem easy to detach and
clean.
You get a dolly and trestles, a succinct interior -with some wall
detail also- (yet not much will be visible anyway) and a relatively
small part count. The windshield is cast as a sort of cage, not as a
clear part. You may clean it (there is a bit of thin flash in many
parts), paint it, and fill the voids with window-maker (clear glue), or
just replace it with folded thin clear sheet.
The decals seem well printed and sharp.
The float halves (total bananas in my sample) have locating devices,
but show no location marks for the struts that I can see, which shall
make things interesting.
The molding as said is quite good, yet not in the same league of -for example- SBS's offerings.
I got what it looks like a short pour on one of the trolley wheels, nothing terrible tough.
Addendum after actually building the kit: BEWARE: this kit is completely inaccurate, has engineering issues, and has to be reworked to a great extent to represent the real plane
I see so far three noticeable issues (more have appeared since, read below all the way):
1) The radiators on the wing have an exaggerated thickness, they would benefit from some toning down.
2) The kit has depicted an area immediately above the fuselage oil
coolers as extra radiator surfaces (or something like that), but these
areas (both sides) were actually windows, included to help the very
restricted visibility the pilot had.
3) There is an abrupt transition (more like a cut-off section) of the
fairings of the cylinder banks (fore and aft) mid-fuselage (cockpit
area), which I don't think is correct. The windows -described above-
located in panels seem in photos to make a less abrupt transition
between the said volumes.
As you look at photos you may realize that there was an early
configuration with a different rudder (mainly just the upper half) and
continuous elevator, smaller and taller windshield and a couple less
struts connecting the tailbooms.
It was altered to a different, larger vertical stabilizer with some
area now below the elevator, separated elevator halves, a couple more
struts, and ultimately a longer, less intrusive windshield (but the
taller windshield stayed for a while longer in spite of the mentioned
changes)
The kit is missing a very small headrest seen in photos.
A good reference:
In it is mentioned that the floats may have been altered at some point
to a flat bottom at the step, actually leaning symmetrically to the
sides to avoid spray on the tail.
I could not yet corroborate this statement with photos, which tend not to show the plane from below of course.
Two more things you will need to correct:
1) The outwardmost section of the wing radiators doesn't start exactly
at the aileron, but a little inwards, extending on a narrow strip up to
the trailing edge, like the other sections.
2) The tailboom fairings do not stop mid-stab as depicted on the kit,
but go all the way to the elevator's trailing edge, of course dwindling
down, that way they cover the control horns and associated cables.
It always surprises me how many things can be found just by attentively
looking at photos, the most reliable source of information, instead of
looking at plans, drawings, sketches and such.
Don't get me wrong, I am ecstatic that manufacturers will release this
type of kits, which I love (and try to support by buying them), but it
irks me that details that are plain to see in photos easily accessed
online, for free (and not having to enter the vaults at the Vatican
library) are inaccurately depicted.
Google* and Learn, I say.
(*Use
any search engine and learn)
From the SDASM (San Diego Air and Space Museum) Flickr photostream:
More little surprises:
The long decals that go on the floats should have the white band in the middle of the two light blue ones centered at the tip of the triangle, not displaced to one side.
Again, surprised by how many things are plain there to see in photos that have been ignored, overlooked or misinterpreted.
So far I think a reasonably experienced modeler can deal with those, if of course it will no doubt lengthen the building time, and require a bit of research and patience.
In spite of the photo below, I haven't yet succumbed to the imperialistic and monarchic hordes at this bastion of Britishness (the inlaws):
We are back home!
Yeepee!!
Good food, no babies, no dogs!!!
The trip back was a bit of drag, freeway construction, snow on the mountain passes and the unavoidable nightmare of our hated 405 freeway in LA, meant that the drive extended for nine hours straight (with a refueling stop). Grueling California traffic, exacerbated of course by the season, and the fact that 40 million Californians are on the road trying to get through the three thorough main fares that connect the Central Valley with LA and Beyond, a mathematical and physical impossibility.
In their perennial search for accuracy (tongue in cheek here, of course), Karaya has filled the tires with air, but unfortunately this caused one wheel to miserably crumble at the least provocation:
So to the spares bin is, on the look for a suitable replacement pair.
I don't think I will be using this crumbly either. Not sure why Karaya didn't use a printed acetate, or some clear material to be folded accompanied by a frame decal or masks?
The struts lost they pins in transit, sadly a common occurrence with resin bits. Matters not, as it's probably better to metal pin them:
Parts are separated from their pouring blocks, sanded to eliminate rests of the attachment traces, and washed:
Now tell me:
Instead of the extremely dubious prospect of butt-joining and aligning the tail-booms that have almost no contact surface (an no locating devices):
Wouldn't have made much more sense to practice notches in the involved parts, and make the boom longer and self-aligning and self-locking (and therefore much more secure)?:
I may do exactly that, carve notches and replace the booms with brass Strutz.
The hydrodynamic advantages of the Banana Float are indisputable:
So, here is the completely bogus section that needs redoing, as it has nothing to do, at all, with reality:
And since we are at it, new, more accurate wheels following actual photos of the real thing:
As explained above, the kit's solution for the tailbooms is not only inaccurate (doesn't reflect reality), but also unsound from an engineering point of view (butt-join in four places flimsy and small resin booms).
So the parts of the boom that are molded on the surfaces have to be excised, thence providing a slot as a better, stronger, sounder anchoring point for a much better replacement:
Brass Strutz lengths are cut to size (Thanks John and Andrew!)
And will eventually be inserted in the slots, as they are aligned:
And this is how reality (i.e. photos, not a Mickey Mouse drawing) is like. The booms go all the way to the end of the stab, and then fairings go all the way on the elevators:
DO NOT use the provided plan to measure anything, it is printed on a slightly smaller scale!:
The props have no locating devices either on the part or the fuselage, and since they have to be held somehow to be painted, it is necessary to add axles:
For those interested in some free Schneider background reading, there is a downloadable old NACA report:
THE SCHNEIDER TROPHY CONTEST
By Alfred Richard Weyl
Here:
https://ia802601.us.archive.org/4/items/NASA_NTRS_Archive_19930094705/NASA_NTRS_Archive_19930094705.pdf
With some plans and photos of racers at the end
Pontoon supports are provided...
...but since Karaya doesn't provide a parts' map or parts' names, you have
to guess a bit. In this case I was wondering if I had the beams for the
supports or something else, since there were seven of them, but I guess
one is a spare:
And they are assembled:
The floats halves are glued together (one had banana sides as shown somewhere above). They needed filler in some spots:
Hereby I officially declare this kit a Catastrophic Flop Riddled with Inaccuracies.
Once I readied the floats, I wanted to see where the struts were located on them and on the belly of the model,
since Karaya cheerfully omitted the courtesy of providing them as marked location on the parts. And considering that the
plan their provide is a different scale than the model in the box, I printed two plans from my references, which in turn produced the surprise that nothing in the kit coincides with any of the plans I have, printed to proper scale and considering the measures given on the references.
If that wasn't enough, I just spotted, looking at photos, that the horizontal tail of the model is (yet again) a Mickey Mouse tail, as the elevator projections fall short (in all photos) of the stab leading edge, unlike the model part, where they coincide.
For heaven's sake, K, where the heck did you look to make this kit?
This calls for further pondering, printing of more plans, comparison with photos, and determining a way of salvage this kit from hell, that looked so deceivingly good in the box.
Merry Christmas gift? regarding this kit, rather the Eric Idle song making the rounds about it! (only for staunch iconoclasts, al others please give a pass).
OK, let me correct the statement I made above...
It's even worse than I thought: This kit is incredibly inaccurate and seems to show no regard for proper research.
I think I found the origin of most of its fantasy features: two
plans, one in Mendenhall's "The Air Racer", and another in Letectví +
Kosmonautika 20/92, both notorious for their less than loose relation to
reality.
So now the origin of the plethora of spurious details (I just found yet
another issue, the front float struts anchor on the fuselage on a
different position than the one shown in the -bogus- plan with the kit)
is perhaps made clear.
And to think that the only action needed by the manufacturer was to compare the plans it wanted to use with
any photo, freely and easily accessible on the Internet. Sigh...
Meanwhile, I assembled the cockpit pan, for which I had to fabricate a
joystick, since I found none among the kit parts. Just to show my
commitment 😄
By the way: the beaching trolley had four wheels, not two, a fact obvious in most photos you can find on the Net.
Here some parts are given their base colors:
The props are given the metal color. Unlike most props, these ones did not have anti-glare applied to the corresponding sides:
Correction of the elevator:
The cockpit is completed:
The small headrest seen in photos, and omitted by the kit, is added. A new windshield is made to replace the not very effective and inaccurate kit rendition of it, that came broken anyway in my case.
The interior is already in, as those two white pieces of styrene will close the cockpit area, together with narrow pieces of clear plastic on the sides to be able to replicate the windows, mistaken in the kit for auxiliary radiators or something.
Thus the wrong shape of the center section of the kit will hopefully be corrected.
Pity they got so many things wrong, this could have been a very nice kit -if an effort for a modicum of accuracy should have been made:
As indicated somewhere above, Karaya misplaced the position of the struts in their plan, and did not indicate their locations either on floats or fuselage bottom.
Using references the locations are marked and drilled. Note: the lengths of floats and fuselage may be shorter than they should.
At this point, instead of trashing this kit as it surely deserves, I am correcting what I can and compromising in some areas, with the goal of becoming as close as possible to reality without having to fabricate a completely new model from scratch, or spending hundreds of hours on it.
The beaching dolly provided is bogus, but at least it can be used to align things (hopefully) when the time to unite fuselage and floats via the struts comes:
The two areas that will be masked eventually to make the windows are glued.
The "cover" part to keep the shape of the fuselage (botched by Karaya) is made of three shaped pieces of styrene:
Loosely put one to give an idea of how it works:
All glued on now:
The area is masked:
Putty applied and blended:
The bottom seam, not very tidy in areas, is also puttied protecting the rest:
The kit exhibits a noticeable swept-back, absent on all the plans I have:
After that issue is corrected lightly sanding the roots on the fuselage (without disturbing detail, which is not easy) the wings are glued with the proper dihedral:
First coat of primer, and of course a few blemishes to take care of:
Windshield masked:
The home-made booms are added to the rectified horizontal tail:
Vertical tail is added, as well as the new boom fairings, and the location of the booms on the wing is smoothed with some putty:
Some resin manufacturers use a much harder resin for stressed parts, or add real metal pins in the molding. Not this case, I am afraid. One of the float struts came with a broken locating pin, so the location is carefully drilled and a metal pin added. The other end of the struts has to be drilled and pinned too, to ensure a better anchoring. I am almost sure that eventually I will have to replace all those feeble resin pins. We'll see:
Not surprisingly, yet another inaccuracy of the Karaya kit: the V strut that unites boom, tail and float is misplaced in the kit's instructions, and should be where the red lines are, at the end of the float:
At this point drilling of the many rigging anchoring points is done on wings and floats.
The rigging on top of the wing of the kit is...yeap, you guessed: inaccurate, as it shouldn't be parallel to the leading and trailing edges, but instead angle backwards a bit. Look at photos.
The building of this kit feels exactly like this:
You go on a countryside walk and you are told that following a certain path you are to arrive at a certain place. You are given a map, which doesn't look accurate compared to the photos you have seen of the place, but heck, you decide to trust the tourism agency. As soon as you start to walk, you notice that something is wrong, so you get other maps from kind people along the road. Now, instead of a pleasant walk enjoying the view, you feel you are lost, the map they gave you originally is crap, and has very little to do with the place and the path. So now you are forced to go on for a little stretch, have a look at the other maps, go another stretch, and so forth.
By then you are not enjoying yourself much, and just want not to get lost, and to arrive home safely.
Still, an attractive plane. So we go on. Making some compromises on the way.
Primer on everything:
The edges of the floats were not well defined, so a little help with putty was necesary:
The absence of locating holes or even marks on the floats and fuselage for the struts, and the absence of good pins on the latter, made location and rigging a very frustrating and time consuming endeavor.
It seems that instead of working with the kit you had to fight it every step of the way to get to a reasonable point. As commented above I am using the (otherwise inaccurate) beaching trolley to help with alignment:
The fit of the ends of the struts on the parts is dismal, but with plenty superglue and I guess some time spent later with putty may help:
Springy steel wire was used to link the floats among themselves. The rigging styrene piece will be removed prior to gluing the struts to the fuselage belly, of course.
Not what you may call a pleasant build, this one is:
But I was still not convinced with the poor fit of those kit struts, so I yanked everything away and made new struts:
The new struts in place. The aft struts from the kit have been glued in place too. I am uncertain as how will they fit and align with the rest:
As I suspected the V struts at the end of the floats did not fit properly, the fore ones being too short by about 2mm.
The culprits were removed and new ones made, to be added later on the build:
Ready now for the first coat of paint:
White is airbrushed (upper right corner), taking advantage of a larger session:
The bottom of the floats is masked, since it will remain white:
The fuselage pod is painted aluminium:
Red is airbrushed on floats and canopy frames, whilst brass is applied on the wing radiators (after masking the silver on top of the pod):
Masks off. Just a few touches needed:
Masks on the pod and floats bottom are removed:
Detail work starts (headrest cushion, seat backplate, fuselage top exhausts, accentuation of side radiators, etc.):
The model is on its feet now. Still to be added are the two other short struts that unite booms and floats, the many rigging lengths, props, decals and windshield:
Spidering begins:
And now a word about the decals.
The are thin, and very fragile, and do not like to be moved around at all.
As commented during the build, the long decals on the floats -with a
comet shape- have an asymmetric tail, the blue at the sides of the white is larger on top, whilst
should have been equal on both sides.
Also, apparently it was too much work to match
the shape of the rudder with that of the decal, because you are provided
with a larger than necessary and rectangular-shaped image, so you have to use
the rudder as a pattern an trim the excess.
After some tension the decals are on, I am glad I am done with them. The rigging is completed, the props on (the back prop is the wrong diameter and will hit the booms), the windshield is on, the beaching trolley assembled (it is different than in all photos shoving it, and the kit's inaccurate wheels were substituted with ones similar to those seen in photos).
The only missing parts are those struts that I had to substitute, their paint is drying on that clothespin:
This one is no picnic. When I complete a model I am happy because I can see it in all its glory and enjoy it, but with this one I will be happy that it is over!
Il piccolo modello in scala ridotta è completato
All going well, tomorrow may be I can do the completed model photo session and post it:
To be continued.....
