Manufacturer: Vintage Models
Aircraft: Savoia Marchetti S.79 Sparviero
Scale: 1/72
Medium: Limited-run dark grey resin with brass-etch/white metal detail parts and vacform canopy (no spares)
Decals: Tauro decal sheets (also available separately)
Pros: Good accurate shape and detail parts.
Cons: Poor quality fuselage moulding and poor wing alignment. Expensive.

This review is a companion to the 1/48th Vintage S.79 review I did a while back.

Kit.

I ordered this kit from Misterkit months ago (before I found out about Italeri's forthcoming release) and after having almost forgotten about it, it finally showed up. All major parts are in dark grey resin, with a brass etch detail sheet, a vacform canopy (resin former included), a small bag of white metal parts, Tauro decal sheet of generic wing markings, Savoy Crests etc, plus a section cut out of another Tauro sheet for 3 S.79's, a few photocopied A4 instruction sheets that included photo references taken from the Ali d'Italia books and a loose colour print-out of the boxart as well (numbered 115 and signed). They all came in a large box padded out with pages torn from a recent issue of SAMI. It gave the impression that the whole thing was hurriedly put together.

Fuselage.

Any favourable first impressions were quickly dispelled when I saw the poor quality of the fuselage moulding. It's almost a complete piece (only the top section is separate) and there was a lot of distortion on the port side, probably due to insufficient curing before being removed from the mould. I could have asked for a replacement, but I felt confident enough to be able to straighten it out with some hot water treatment. The raised panel lines used to depict the fabric effect is very crude and will need to be reduced with some sanding. The thick fuselage walls will also mean that all openings will not have the scale effect either. On top of that, the moulding block for the fuselage is huge and extreme care is needed when removing it.

The resin box used for the cockpit flooring needs modifying to get it to sit level inside the fuselage. I enhanced the brass etch detail with plastic rod and card to show internal tubular structure and give dimension to the various control boxes/radio set etc. Its worth doing as the kit has an open 'hunchback' option only, so a fair amount of this detail will be seen. The opening in the fuselage rear for the gondola is too far forward, off centre and oversized. The best way to tackle this is to blank it off with plasticard and make a new opening. If you decided to close the side access door and gun positions you could leave it blanked off, as very little will be seen through the small side windows. The interior of the S.79 is said to be light grey, not the usual "verde anti-corrisovo" green.

Wings.

Because of the way the fuselage is moulded, it is possible to attach the wings before it is closed up. Unfortunately both wings sweep back too far, especially the port wing. To correct it, wedges of plasticard were added to the port wing and adjustments made to both wing fillets until, after much test fitting, an accurate join was achieved. During this process, care also had to be taken to make sure the shallow dihedral was maintained. There are white metal mass balances for the separately moulded ailerons, but the hinges will need to be scratchbuilt, as well as those for the separately moulded flaps (photos show that they were rarely dropped when parked).

Engines/Undercarriage

The engine/undercarriage fairings fit OK but some filler is needed to get a smooth join. There are no obvious attachment points for the engines, so they were glued into the cowlings. The slightly larger fuselage engine cowl had a large trapped air pocket that needed filling with Milliput and extra reinforcement made to the inside with plasticard due to a weakness in the moulding. The white metal exhausts are the early versions, so you will need to scratchbuild new exhausts for the later models (when choosing the the colour scheme for your aircraft, check to see which ones it should have). The propellers and spinners are white metal, as are the undercarriage legs.

The resin wheels are weighted. The tail wheel assembly is a complex brass etch/white metal construction which needs careful assembly.

Finishing off the construction

When it came to putting the "lid" on the fuselage, a bit of filler was needed to get a good join in some areas. All the tail surfaces were trouble free, although the thick white metal tailplane struts are best replaced with either "Contrail" or brass "Strutz" versions. The vac form parts for the glazing are not very well done and, added to the fact that the resin frame work for some of the cockpit canopy is quite heavy, it might be better remove it altogether and use Falcon's replacement canopy instead. The small windows along the base of the rear fuselage will need to be made from clear sheet.

Decals and painting

Decals are by Tauro, so quality is assured. There is a choice of three schemes, an early Spanish civil war version with brown mottles on green, a desert camouflaged aircraft with green and brown mottles on sand and a torpedo laden aircraft which had light grey mottles on dark olive green (this had the later style exhaust and was my choice of markings). SkyModels do a sheet with a wider range of schemes, if none of these take your fancy. 

Summary

This kit would have been great ...if the fuselage was better quality. It was the source of all the major problems I encountered with this kit. I would recommend that you wait to see how good the Italeri release will be before deciding whether to get this one. If Italeri's excellent little C.202 kit is anything to go by it should be no contest, especially in the price stakes, as the Italeri kit will be £9.99 (instead of £60+ for this Vintage kit).