Eduard's 1/48 scale
Mirage IIICJ

by Jose Lucero

Eduard's 1/48 scale Mirage III CJ is available online from Squadron.com

Eduard's Mirage IIIC kit in 1/48th scale is the best kit of this important French fighter. It leaves it's competition behind. I used the Profipack version of the kit. It's comprised of more than 100 finely molded pieces with crisp engraved detail. It offers two frets of pre-painted photo etched metal that is mostly destined for the cockpit and ejection seat harnesses. There is also a great lead weight that fits inside the nosecone, vynil painting masks and an excellent selection of decals.

The cockpit of this kit is very simple to build. It's painted black and all the detail is provided by colored photo etch for the dashboards and consoles. The ejection seat provided is rather simple so I used a resin one that provided much more detail with the colored photo etch harnesses instead.

Building the kit doesn't have that many pitfalls if you test fit, clean and sand to achieve a good join.

There are three critical joins that I would recommend any builder pay special attention to. The first one is the tail because it's completely molded on a half of the fuselage, so dry fitting is necessary to minimize the join. The second point is the wings. The leading edge of the wing is molded on the top half. A lot of care is needed so that a lot of the great detail on the bottom of the wing is not lost. The air intakes is very fragile and tends to break.

Paint

For me, the best way to admire the elegant lines is in it's natural metal finish. To achieve the elusive effect of a natural metal finish I used the Alclad II system. A proper primer base is a must to get good results with Alclad. For this project I used decanted Krylon Gloss Black to prime the model.

After it had dried, I used a mix of Alclad laquers based on Yoav Efrati's Mirage IIICJ article published in Scale Aircraft Modeler to paint the Mirage. After the paiting was finished, I sealed it with a coat of Future to prepare the model for decals.

Decals

I choose to do No.59 of the 101st Tayaset, Heyl ha'Avir, during the 6 Day War in 1968. Eduard's decals are excellent, very thin and in register. The most difficult decals to apply are the red details in the air intakes. The rest of the decals where applied without any troubles.

All in all Eduard managed to do a great kit of a very important aircraft. Very recommended. If you want to read this article in spanish you can go to
http://www.ipmsguatemala.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=70&Itemid=3
at www.ipmsguatemala.net

Greetings from Guatemala!
 

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Text and Images Copyright 2007 by Jose Lucero
Page Created 22 February, 2007
Last Updated 24 December, 2007

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