I
got this Heller Mirage 2000C last year as a gift from my brother in law. A
French aircraft from a French man
Thus
I was for the first time opening a Heller model box. I was positive surprised
about the overall impression. And this impression continued to be positive until
the final result! I have now an N version in stack, and will buy a second C and
N soon.
Perhaps
the only bad critic I want to give to this kit is the missing centre line fuel
tank. Something you find on every reference photo should also be included in the
kit, I think… I checked the N box already, and there the 2 larger under wing
fuel tanks, as seen on almost every N and D Mirage (and now -5F!), are nicely
moulded in the box! Good news there.
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If
you try to search for references and after market stuff for the Heller Mirages
(and the others too) you get faced with some problems. There is not much
available. The things I got were the OOB
Black Box
Cockpit (C only), the rather
old
Eduard
PE and the luckily reissued and
nicely printed
Daco/Astra
decal sheet
for the Cambrai Mirages. With this decals you also get a very helpful booklet
about the Cambrai based Mirage units. (There is a Twobobs Tigermeet sheet
available, too. But the given camouflage pattern is totally wrong. Be careful if
you use the instructions there!) Perhaps the newer Eduard PE for the ESCI/Italeri
kit could be used, too.
The
construction is straight forward, not much to say there. Pretty much comparable
to the workload of a Hasegawa 1/48 F-16.The quality of the Blackbox cockpit is
good, as usual, and the kit has only a minor fit problem between the upper wing
halves and the fuselage. But you can correct this with some putty very easily.
After assembling the kit I have only 4 points to mention:
-
The
gear bay doors are normally closed when the aircraft is on ground. Heller
has them all open. To close them, be prepared to have the sanding stick and
plastic card ready. You will use them!
-
The
gear bays in general have almost no detail. As mentioned it’s difficult to
get reference material, but if you close the doors you can’t see much
anyway.
-
The
wing should have a negative V profile, but my model has an absolute straight
one. Perhaps you could change that with hot vapour?
-
My
model has only the Blackbox pit in the nose, and that’s just enough to
keep the final result on all three wheels. Add some weight in the nose!
I
didn’t like the two guns on the Heller kit, so I decided to cut them open and
replace them with steel tubing. The result was worth the effort! I also replaced
the old style chaff and flare dispensers (included in the Eduard PE) with the
new one included in the kit. These parts actually are nowhere mentioned on the
Heller instruction sheet, but they’re there! Some work with a file and plastic
rods will turn these parts into two nice dispensers. Thank you Heller!
The
pitot I replaced with steel tubing, too. The pilot figure is a Frenchised
Hasegawa F-15 pilot. I repositioned the arms and hands to get this pose.
My
jet exhaust was badly moulded. This is by the way only one piece, and somewhat
difficult to paint inside. I found a packing slip in my box, and wrote Heller in
France
to get a new exhaust. He arrived 2 weeks later. Customer support seems to be
working fine there!
I
painted my model with the acrylic colours from Vallejo (Model Air and Model
Colour). Both give a very nice result, and are a joy to spray with my airbrush
(0.2mm). The colours I used were:
-
French
Mirage blue (Model Colour 900) FS35240
-
Light
grey (Model Air 47) FS36320
-
Mix
of Model Air 47 and 54 (FS36320 & FS36099) to match the colour on the
radome to my photos
For
all metallic and aluminium areas (gear) I used the Alclad II brand. The masking
I have done using Tamiya tape checking my references for the correct pattern. I
preshaded all panel lines with black, and I’m very satisfied with the effect!
After a layer of Future I added the very nice decals from Daco/Astra. A layer of
Future again, and the panel lines were highlighted with black water based ink
from Ecoline Holland. Then I used Vallejo’s
matt varnish to break the gloss and shiny finish. The rest of the weathering has
been done with artist’s pastel colours.
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To
finish the aircraft, I got an Airfix (Mirage 2000B) centre line tank from ARC
regular Ed, and the Magic 2 out of the Revell Rafale kit from ARC regular JBL.
(These are the most correct and beautiful Magic 2’s you can get by now!) Thank
you both for the help!
Actually
I mixed up two versions of the Magic… Silver head and clear seeker is the
older version, white head and tan seeker is the newer version. Don’t make the
mistake as I did!
This
aircraft was a lot of fun to be built, so I decided to add to my future
projects:
-
a
conversion of the actual C kit to a -5F
-
an
N version (Heller kit), unfortunately OOB L as far as I know
-
an
N version converted to D
-
and
perhaps the last Tigermeet scheme C as on the picture below (beside the
original of 12-YK / 104)
You
can see that I won’t stop my hobby soon…
What
else could be said? I for myself prefer the Heller kit over the Italeri/ESCI
one, as the Italeri one represents the Mirage 2000 prototype. The older Revell
kit is OOB, had raised panel lines, but as I heard is a very fine kit, too.
It’s sad that there are not more decals available for 1/48 Mirages, for newer
or other versions actually none! The only ones available I found were the Daco/Astra
sheet I used, the mentioned Twobobs sheet, and some Carpena sheets. Later ones I
have never seen myself.
I
was looking and searching a long time for good references, here what I have
found:
Book:
Combat
Air Patrol, Ian Black, www.airlifebooks.com
19.95$US, ISBN 1-84037-336-9
I
hope I could motivate some of you to build one of these very sexy looking French
deltas. It would be nice if the Mirage 2000 section in the ARC gallery would
have as many entries as the F-16 one! And if you don’t like the French subject
too much, try a Hellenic or Taiwanese one. Peru
has the Mirage 2000 and one of the newest customers is Brazil (http://www.mirage2000br.com.br).
India, Abu Dabi and Egypt are some other interesting subjects. And I’m sure
that I have missed some other operators!
I’m
looking forward to see your model
Leander
(This
kit has been build for and is dedicated to my French wife Fabienne)
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