>Windsock has 1/72nd scale drawings out. Look for Vol 6 No 4 and No
>5. These issues include wonderful interior photo's, as well.
>
Actually the Windsock piece is a Three part article by Harry Woodman
on the Ilya Muromets found in Volume 6 Numbers 3,4,5. This includes very
good drawings of a Type B "Veh" machine.
With this in hand I have looked over the kit a bit more critically.
The model represents an Ilya Muromets Type B "Veh" with a pointed nose.
The Woodman article notes that only the first five aircraft of teh 30 or so
produced in this series had this pointed nose. One photo in the article
shows a pointed nose "Veh" with two Salmson engines, this was a conversion
to a training machine. I also held up some pieces of the kit to the plan
view drawings. The fuselage and wings look OK dimension-wise, though I
didn't count the ribs. The big discrepancies are in the rudders and
stabilizer. Everything here appears to be off with the kit bits being
undersized with respect to the Woodman drawings, the stabilizer is perhaps
20% undersized.
For what its worth, Windsock Vol.6 #1 has pictures of a 1/32 scale
Ilya that was made for the Smithsonian exhibition on Sikorsky's centennial
birthday. This is a type G machine and quite different from this kit.
Also the book "Sikorsky- The Russian Years" is a translation of journal
entries by a man named Finne who worked closely on development and
operations of the Ilya machines, his work was translated and edited by
Bobrow and von Hardesty and the book published in 1987.
Charles
hartc@spot.colorado.edu