1/48 Trumpeter  

Savoia-Marchetti S.M.79-ll

Three engined Torpedo/bomber

Kit No.02817

by Ted Taylor

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This kit came my way barely started, a friend had tried and found some ill fitting parts and given up.
    The box contains five light grey frames of nicely detailed parts with fine engraved panels Lines, the parts are not top quality though as some have shaggy edges and a lot of parts need cleaning up.
This is not the easiest kit in the world; some parts are ill fitting such as the leading edge slats, the engine back plates need sanding to size before the cowlings will go on comfortably. The instructions sheet has the fuselage side windows in the wrong number sequence, you should try each window in each hole before cementing as some are fractionally larger than others but they will all fit in the correct hole perfectly.

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The nacelles are not a good fit and some filler will be needed plus as I mentioned earlier the leading edge slats will only fit if left deployed, to close them is a problem as they will not cover the entire area and I used a strip of 15 thou card to fill the slot on top of the wing rather than using filler. The wing fillets on the trailing edges are very thick and consequently suffer with shrinkage, filler again needed. The engine cowlings are peculiar as the joins are off set to port, a bit unusual I thought, and the locations for correct alignment are at least poor and hard to see when the engine is in place so take extra care here.  

That said, the rest of the kit is easy, I built it in less than a week. When the main construction was done the canopy and windows were masked with Tamiya tape and the side gun windows were temporarily fitted with PVA glue to avoid the spray entering the fuselage, the cowlings were slid into position but the engines were not added until all the camo was finished. Italian interior green was sprayed around the cockpit to establish the interior colouring and at the same time I used it to check all my joints and fillings.

The fuselage band and spinners were sprayed with Humbrol 130 White, when dry the band was masked and the light grey was sprayed on the under surfaces which was also masked when dry and the sand colour was used as an overall colour for the top. the camo pattern is a nightmare trying to follow so I did a freehand job with the green and russet trying to give an overall effect, the sand was used again to retouch the lines between colours to get rid of any overspray.  

The fronts of the cowlings were sprayed with alclad II steel and then a light dusting of copper, the bright band behind that is a strip of chrome Sellotape which I thought looked effective.

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The whole model was now coated in Klear (future) a couple of light dusted coats first then a full thicker coat; this was allowed to harden and it was lightly, I mean lightly, rubbed over with worn out 1200 grade wet or dry paper until it was like the proverbial baby's backside. The decals were added and these are very good as no camo shows through the white areas.  Once dry the whole lot was coated again with Klear and left to dry then my final matting mix of 3 parts Klear and  1 part Tamiya flat base was dusted on to give that nice almost flat finish that I like.  Now all the engines were added and the protruding guns painted by hand with Tamiya gun metal and any small details attended to, the props were sprayed with alclad II polished alluminium and mounted up to finish the job off.

While it is not the best kit in the world it certainly makes an excellent model with lots of possibilities for different colour schemes including Luftwaffe and British markings, I hope you like it as much as I did.

Ted

Drop by Ted's Website to see more of his models.  Ted Taylor's Modelworks

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Photos and text © by Ted Taylor