Eduard's 1/48 scale
Dassault Mirage IIICJ

by Mick Evans

Eduard's 1/48 scale Mirage IIICJ is available online from Squadron

Having built every Mirage kit in 1/48 scale including the Fonderie Miniatures kit, I was interested to see how the Eduard kit would compare.

FM provides the most accurate resin details for the Mirage IIIE variant but the kit suffers from limited run injection moulding problems in the fuselage and it uses the wings and a few other details from the Heller Mirage kit.

Until the release of the Eduard kit the Heller offering of the Mirage IIIC was probably the best IIIC with the Esci kit a close second.

The Eduard kit is quite accurate in its detail with my only real criticism being the cockpit and ejection seat. These are a bit simplified but they are still light years ahead of the competition except for the resin sets that are available.

I built the kit straight from the box replacing only the ejection seat with a Pavla resin seat.

The scheme is for a Shahak in the typical Israeli desert scheme. I was going to do a Shahak with the high vis yellow and black triangles on the wings and tail. The kit instructions depict this as does the box art. On researching the data I became aware that the instructions depict a museum aircraft repainted and I could not find a Shahak fitted with an Atar 9B engine with the high vis yellow and black triangles. It appears that the only Shahaks to receive these marking are those fitted with the Atar 9C engine which had a cut back engine cowl ring, but I may be wrong.

The Matra 530 missile provided in the kit is very nice and certainly looks good fitted on the centreline pylon.

It would have been nice if Eduard had included the waisted 110 gallon supersonic external fuel tanks that were developed by the Israelis and procured by the RAAF.

The kit was finished in Xtracolour enamels and the superb kit decals were used.


 

Click the thumbnails below to view larger images: 

Text and Model Copyright 2007 by Mick Evans
Images Copyright 2007 by Brett Green
Page Created 01 February, 2007
Last Updated 24 December, 2007

Back to HyperScale Main Page