I believe this is one of the first (if not The first) Mirage kit. It consist of some 60 parts made of white plastic. The detail is fair, in some places little bit crude. E.g. I doubt that the metal covers on the fuselage were in reality standing out so much and the wing and elevator ribs are a bit overdone as well.
The box offers decals for two aircraft from late thirties and the instruments. Silver/green one of the aero club in Lvov and silver/grey of military school in Deblin. There is a bit strange thing about this version as to serial number and the id number is provided only for the left side of the fuselage (I did not find any information on the net about this). The versions doesn't correspond with the box picture.
Instructions are six A5 pages and are quite clear appart of that there is missing positioning of some instruments decals. You get briefe history of the aircraft, colour codes and black/white camouflage schemes.
I made this kit ages ago as a Silver/green option but never appplied the decals. After some moving and few years later I decided to repair and finish this model in the colours of Deblin flight school. I stript the old colours using NaOH. Then I had to replace some struts with the ones I made, as the originals got broken (they are very fine indeed). Another modification was to remove the side tubes covering the ruder riding wires (there were no such thing on the photographs I had come across).
The seats have the seatbelts, I left them, but glued the paper painted with Satin Humbrol H71 ones over it. After painting and some "aging" I made the wires using 0,18 mm fishing rod, these were glued with super glue to the proper places and straightened with hair drier then painted with 50/50 mix of Revells gun metal and silver. When this was done, I painted the windshiled and glued them to proper places in front of both cockpits.
The base for the model is pretty simple. I masked the "patch" on the plywood 20 x 15 cm desk and glued three layers of the dirt from my flower pots using thick white glue. When this was dry, I applied the arteficial grass (Czech firm Polak makes variations length and colours as well as the bushes and few kind of trees) in few steps using homemade device to keep it standing. After that I sprayed the grass with different shades of green just to unify little bit the colour of the "lawn". And that was it.
The interior was painted after assembly (due to stripping the old colours the interior paint was lost too) with silver Revell 90 enamel and washed with thinned dark grey. Handles of the sticks were painted with Humbrol Rustas it looked to me more lke leather padng then use the brawn colour. Then the interior was masked.
The front of the aircraft was sprayed with Revell 90 silver. The rest was supposed to be silverish grey. I mixed the Revell 90 with Humbrol light grey H29 to get the colour I supposed to be ok. I sprayed the whole aircraft with this mixture exept the engine part.
Next thing I did, was applying of the decals (I made basic error and didn't spray the aircraft with the clear gloss and ended up with silvering, blast it). The decals went nicely without any chemistry. The only issue is, as I mentioned above, that the decals of the serial number and the aircraft id number is provided only fo one side (even in the recently rereleased kit) and I am not sure if this is correct. When decals were applied (exept the instruments) the whole model got coat of clear gloss before applying the "dirt". For that I used oil sienna and black thinned with Humbrol enamel thinner.
Nice kit of unusual aircraft, although not up to todays demands regarding the detail, still makes a nice model. It has been re-released recently and for the price around 10 euros is definitaly worth it.
June 2009