Mirage F.1 - Italeri Bye-Bye Mirage 1/48

[kiseca]

My Red Arrows Hawk is nearly complete so it's time for me to make a start on my next projects. This is one I've had, and been keen to build, for quite some time. I've mentioned a number of times on this forum that I grew up in South Africa in the 1980s, so I won't go to deep into repeating that story again. Suffice to say the Mirage F.1 was the air force's premier fighter at the time. Thus the F.1 and its predecessor the Mirage III are the fighter jets that dominated my childhood. I love the look of the F.1 in particular so have always wanted to build one, and now the time has come!

 

The model is Italeri's 1/48 kit with the Bye-Bye Mirage markings, commemorating the aircraft's final years in service with the French airforce. According to Scalemates, this kit was released in 2019 as a rebox with new decals, but it started life as an ESCI kit in 1978. It's age shows in a number of ways which I'll get to during the build.

 

The box shows two of the available liveries provided with the kit:

 

 

Here are the sprues. One sign of its age is that, on the body, the two antennae on the spine, and the two bullet fairings that are part of the moulding on the vertical stabilizer both need to be removed according to the destructions instructions.

 

 

There are mouldings for a second ejection seat. I have no idea why.

 

 

 

The decal sheet is dominated by the tail decals. All three options have the sunrise style stripes on the tail.

 

 

This is the livery I'm going to go with. I'd originally planned to build it as a 1980s SAAF CZ but when I saw the livery options, I thought this one looks too good to ignore. I don't have many models in my stash that come with desert or middle eastern style camo so I think this will really stand out.

 

 

 

Also, I have some reading material to help keep me emotionally engaged during the build. "Vlamgat" is the story of the South African Mirage F.1s in SAAF service. They saw action on the border war, and enjoyed roughly twenty years of service. After it's retirement, an F.1 was upgraded to accept a Mig 29 engine. This project didn't go any further as South Africa committed to the Gripen.

 

"Vlamgat" is an Afrikaans nickname for a jet fighter, most commonly in my experience applied to the F1 and / or the jockeys who flew them. The literal translation is "flame hole" but the slang as used would be more closely translated as "flaming bum". 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited April 25, 2022 by kiseca

[Biggles87]

I’ll watch if I may.

I built one of these as an F1CR a couple of years ago with a Neomega cockpit and l’Arsenal recce pod. As you say, it’s showing it’s age in places, but still a decent ki.

 

Good Luck 

 

John

 

🇺🇦

[kiseca]

I am well overdue posting an update on this one. Happily, there has been some progress. I'll break up the posts into milestones to catch up.

 

I started with the cockpit, as always. It doesn't have a lot of detail and the seat / column relative positioning looks a little odd, but it will be closed cockpit so I'm not worried about it. There are two rails on the cockpit's back wall that look like they should fit nicely in between two rsimilar rails on the back of the seat, but the seat detail at the top fouls this so it sits in front of the rails instead of covering them. I don't know if that puts the seat further forward than intended, putting it too close to the column, but the surgery to make it fit would have been very visible so I did not attempt to change it.

 

The instruments are decals, they look OK. Also, I was a bit surprised that most of the interior is black according to the kit instructions, while the cockpit side walls (the inside of the fuselage) are specified to be the more expected grey. Anyway I followed the kit instructions on this occasion.

 

Now, I cannot seem to get images to display when I copy the link from my phone, so I'll need to add those later. 

 

EDIT: solved with different browser. Here's the cockpit.

 

 

 

 

Edited June 10, 2022 by kiseca

[kiseca]

Next up, the front wheel well is formed from a combination of the cockpit floor and the fuselage sides. It has some curves that will make it very difficult to paint once the fuselage halves are joined, so I wanted to paint that wheel well before assembly. While I was at it, the landing gear legs are supposedly the same colour, so I decided to prepare and paint the landing gear assemblies at the same time.

 

Before I got to that, one of this kit's flaws needed to be dealt with on a number of parts. I don't know if it is connected to the kit's age or if it has always been a weakness of the kit, but the ejection pin marks in a lot of places are quite deep and prominent, and are in visible areas. You can see those, and some flash, on the undercarriage parts and wheels in these photos.

 

Main landing gear legs

 

Main landing gear doors

 

Wheels

 

 

I cleared that up before painting. I got away with sanding the doors and legs but needed to fill the holes in the tyres because they are deep.

 

Here are the wheels ready to paint:

 

With that I was ready to paint the undercarriage bays and parts. I used Vallejo Metal Color paints for this, Aluminium for the majority, silver for the hydraulic arms, and Tamiya flat black for some detail and the tyres.

 

 

Despite the flash and ejector pin marks, and the odd fitting seat, I was very impressed with the kit up to this point especially considering its age. The parts fit together really well. The cockpit was wasy to assemble and nothing on it feels fragile, and the landing gear legs have mounting lugs so robist that the model can stand on them without needing to glue them in. I find that landing gear legs are often very fiddly to fit and are extremely fragile when done, but these are fantastic.

 

Edited June 10, 2022 by kiseca

[kiseca]

With the undercart all painted I could join the fuselage halfs and start adding wings, strakes, and other assorted bits. Here again, some preparation work is needed with the intake nozzles. The internal surfaces of these are difficult to paint once assembled so I always paint them before assembly... I assume we all do... but there were three additional challenges in this case.

 

The first challenge is the shape. The intake is semicircular, and the point where the straight edge meets the curved edge on the actual aircraft is rounded. On the model, it's a sharp edge. It's a small detail but I knew it would bug me and there's enough meat in the join so I rounded the edges off.

 

In this pic you can see the left hand edge in the original shape and the right hand edge has been rounded off.

 

 

The second challenge is that on the inner faces, there are odd gaps between the two parts that make up the nozzle. They are there by design on the kit - it's not a poor fit problem - but i see no evidence of the actual aircraft having gaps in this area, and they will be visible on the assembled model.

 

 

I filled those gaps (top and bottom) in before attaching the nozzles to the fuselage.

 

With that, the fuselage assembly could be completed to the point where it is ready to paint.

 

Before that was done though, I got to this point in the assembly and thought of an incident described in that book, Vlamgat.

 

 

In 1985 Captain Holdsworth of the SAAF was engaged in dogfighting exercises in a Mirage F1AZ when, at just short of mach 1, the complete canopy separated from the aircraft with a loud bang. He descended to 200 feet and, once under 200 knots, he could once again hear the radio and declare his emergency. He enjoyed the low, slow ride back to base in his convertible Mirage, saying he was "riding my F1 like a Chevy with the top down." He made the most of the experience, enjoying the open view and finding that at 150 knots he could fly with his elbow on the sill and look out over the side of the aircraft.

 

It seems a nice idea to reference that flight in a model if I could source a 1/48 pilot suitably posed with his elbow on the sill, however I fear it would simply look like I'd lost the canopy part and improvised, rather than faithfully recalling an actual event. Thus I won't be building a SAAF Chevy F1 convertible in the future.

Edited June 10, 2022 by kiseca

[Biggles87]

I like the story.

Good work on the intakes, I hadn’t spotted the error.

 

John

 

[kiseca]

Continuing with joining the frame, the next bit of preparation was around the dorsal strakes under the exhaust nozzle. I am pretty sure all production F1s had these - I've never noticed one without them - but they feel oddly like they are additions to the kit - modifications to the tools - rather than parts that were originally available. I say this because the unusual locating method is basically two slashes carved into the rear fuselage onto which the surface of the strake sits at the right angle. I hope. 

 

The slashes

 

The strakes themselves need some modifying too. They have little detail bumps molded into them, two each side, that look like they could represent joining brackets or something. They do, however, foul on the bodywork and prevent the strake from sitting flush in its slash. So I had to remove them.

 

Strake before surgery

 

 

Next problem that needed solving was how to mask up those semicircular intakes for the paintjob. I'd usually stuff them full of tissue paper and mask off the borders with tape, but up until now, all the jets I've built has simple and nearly always rectangular intakes. This is the first one with rounded intakes, and more importantly, with a shock cone half-in and half-out of them. Masking those with tape was going to be a very fiddly job with a high chance of getting a bad seal somewhere and having paint runs.

 

I decided the best way would be to fashion some plugs for the intakes, that would be stable during painting, give a decent border, protect the interior paintwork, and be easy both to insert and remove.

 

I started by drawing the semicircular profile on some tape, then sticking the tape on a surplus elevator part I had from a Beaufighter model, and then cutting the part out of that nice slim, flat surface and filing it down to shape and size so they'd fit smoothly into the intake holes. Once done' I rounded off the edges so they'd be less likely to scratch the paintwork.

 

 

These on their own wouldn't be easy to line up well in the intake, and wouldn't stay in place once in there. One had already nearly been eaten by the engine while I was still shaping them. I needed locating pins to stabilise and secure them as well as locate them depthwise while keeping them flat and parallel compared to the intake mouth. I used some bits of an old sprue to make the legs. The flat end sits nicely nicely on the plug, making a secure glue point with decent contact area. I sanded the opposite sides down to round them off, again to protect paintwork from scratches.

 

Lastly, I needed something on the front that I could grip with tweezers to allow easy installation and removal of the plugs. I had a pair of identical, triangular pieces in my surplus parts box. Goodness knows what they came from, but they are the right size and I have two of them so I can make them both look the same. I sanded down one face to be flat to make a good glue join, and my intake plugs are ready. The legs look at odd angles but that allows them to clear the shock cone's bulge and sit comfortably against the back wall inside the intake.

 

 

I didn't use any actual intake plugs as references, as these are really masking tools, but once the aircraft is finished, I might throw a dash of red or orange paint at them, stick a few random decal letters and numbers on, and see if they'll make convincing looking intake plugs to display on the model. I might have to reduce the mounting handle size a lot.

[kiseca]

We're nearly all caught up now, so, moving on, the next big decision for me was the camera bulge that sits under the aircraft just forward of the nose landing gear bay. This is another of those parts, like the slats, that feels like a later addition - and it makes sense. The model depicts the CR type, which is quite probably younger than the original kit is. The camera bulge just glues on to the belly of the aircraft. There are no lines, marks or holes to help line it up, you just do it by eyeball. This isn't very difficult as the part has a pointed nose and tail, making it easy to align with the centreline of the fuselage, but it doesn't fit very well.

 

This isn't the only part that feels like a later addition to the kit. Earlier on I mentioned the two strakes, but therr are also two intakes that fit under the fuselage that have no holes, marks or lines to help locate them. They both fit very comfortably on the flat belly with large contact areas for a good, secure join, so it's not a big deal. Overall, I'm still really happy with how well this kit goes together and how secure the joins are. The wings have huge tabs that slide snugly into slots in the fuselage. Those aren't coming off easily, and very difficult to get them misaligned too. The same goes for the elevators, which also have large, long tabs that slide into well matched slots in the fuselage. The downside is you can't pose them in any position except level unless you want to cut them up, but I don't mind that. I've had a few elevators on other models with tiny round locating lugs that have snapped or just don't fit well. More care is needed aligning them, and when they do break, they are difficult to reattach securely.

 

Getting back to the camera bulge: forget the bad fit. More to the point, it's basically a big wart under the chin of my beautiful Mirage, and my big decision was whether or not to attach it and sully the lines or not. It's easy enough to leve off because the fuselage surface detail isn't expecting to be covered by the bulge anyway, so the model would look complete without it. However, it is a CR model, and reconnaissance is one of its functions, so I erred on the side of historical correctness in this case at least, attached the wart and filled in the gaps. When it comes to the horrid looking refuelling probe, however, that crosses the line. It's hideous and it's staying in the box. This can be a short range CR, used for photographing the neighbours or something.

 

The chin wart:

 

 

That last photo reminds me - the canopy and windscreen also aren't a great fit. I had to use filler in the joins, very carefully to try not to get any water in the cockpit, because I was worried the gap would let spray through and ruin the interior or mist up the cockpit glass. 

 

With that done, she's ready to spray!

 

Here are the intake plugs in place. I forgot to add these photos in the previous post.

 

 

 

Now on to the paintjob. The instructions say the underside is flat aluminium on the colour scheme I've chosen. Some sources online agree with this, others say it's light grey. I thought the flat aluminium would look a bit more interesting so I stuck with the instructions here... more or less.

 

Instead of flat aluminium, I used Humbrol 11 which I believe is officially labelled silver, but to me it really looks more like a metallic grey. Particularly when, as is the case with my can, it's old and mostly used up. With age it seems to get more grey and less...metallic. I was originally going to use Humbrol 56, which is their idea of aluminium and is even less shiny, but those cans had expired.

 

I did the whole aircraft in this colour. It's enamel, so it can be the underside's colour and simulaneously be the primer for the camouflage pattern on the upper surfaces. That is sand and brick red, and I'll be using water based acrylics for those. An advantage is, if the camo paint chips, it shows metallic underneath.

 

Here she is in my new paintbooth, with her two coats of Humbrol 11 just applied. Her fuel tank, ECM pods and bomb racks were also painted and are visible in the booth too.

 

 

 

 

 

I added two pylons and the wingtip missile rails to the wings before painting, to ensure I got a good join for those parts. It makes the pylons harder to paint, though, and will make the wing harder to mask when I do the camo colours. We'll see if it's worth it or not. I usually add the pylons after painting. It makes painting easier but then I get a very fragile join and often knock pylons off models while dusting them.

 

Amyway that's now fully up to date. Next comes the sand topcoat.

[exdraken]

Oh  very nice!

I still consider the ESCI  F1 being the better one of those available!

 

[Mark V]

Looking good so far. I built the original Esci kit back in 1980. I liked that kit. I had a Kinetic kit but all of the negative build reviews put me off of it. I traded it away a few months ago for other kits I think I’ll actually build. However, if I do come across the old Esci, or an Italeri, kit for cheap someday I might grab it. 

Thanks for posting.  

[kiseca]

Yeah it's a good kit, especially for its age. It has a few foibles but most kits do. It goes together well, is pretty simple and free of fuss and When I do build another F1 it will be the Esci kit again.

[Biggles87]

I did consider getting the two seater by Kinetic but eventually decided against It,  I prefer kits that actually fit together properly these days, life’s too short.

 

John

 

[Serkan Sen]

Nice progress so far. I will follow with great interest.

Serkan

[kiseca]

The camouflage is done!

 

I started with the lighter colour. The pattern on the fuel tank is wavy so I drew the profile on masking tape, cut the tape along the profile and used that to mask the tank.

 

 

The aircraft masking was a bit simpler, as it is all straight lines. I often use dustbin liner to cover large areas but in this case I just taped everything.

 

I knocked one of the wingtip missile rails off while getting tape on to one of the tighter sections, so I glued that back on and left it a day to set. The next day I knocked it off again...

 

Not wanting to waste another day, I just masked the wingtip edge over instead so I could put the rail back on once the plane was painted.

 

 

I'm using Vallejo Model Air for the major surfaces, the first time I've used them for large coverage. It's a light colour so unsurprisingly took a few coats to get the colour opaque. I find these paints, which are airbrush ready, a bit thick and I spray them at a much higher pressure than what I usually use. I added some flow improver to help reduce that effect and also delay the onset of tip drying. I am not sure how much difference that made, to be honest, I still had to blast it through, but I had no problems with a clogging nozzle at least.

 

The quality of the finish isn't brilliant. It's like the particles of paint are relatively course, or maybe it's just my technique. Maybe I just laid it on too thick. Either way, the quality has a grainy look to it close up. It's acceptable by my standards on an aircraft and will probably be fine on a tank or something. I wouldn't use it on a model car though. It is also going to make accenting the panel lines more difficult.

 

 

With the first colour done, i left it for a,week to make really sure the paint had cured well, and then it was time to get the worms in place for the second colour. I prefer using Blu-tak worm for camouflage, it gives a nice crisp border without being as harsh as masked edges, but it does waste a lot of Blu-tak. I have in the past used liquid mask to cover the areas wbetween the worm that I don't want to paint, and it works pretty well but the blu-tak itself is completely unusable afterwards. I can't separate it from the mask and have to just throw it away. So this time I used masking tape. It took a lot longer to prepare, and while I got more of the blu-tak back I still had to throw away a fair bit of it as it was unsurprisingly well stuck to the tape. And of course it wastes a lot of tape.

 

Next time, I will try dustbin liner or paper. These should be easy to separate but I think will make prep time even longer because I'll need to be more careful making sure it is well sealed on to the blu-tak well along all the borders. Or I could cut the masking tape to size, lay it on the surface, then put worms along the edges to give the desired soft border.

 

I forgot to take any photos of the aircraft masked up but I did at least get one of the fuel tank.

 

 

And here's one of the aircraft covered in worms and with the first coat of brick red on.

 

 

I expect water based acrylic paints to be more fragile than enamels so I wanted to leave the sticky stuff stuck to it for as little time as possible. Thus I masked it up, painted it immediately, then took the masking off as soon as I'd finished tidying up my workspace and cleaning the airbrush.

 

I also must admit I was really keen to see how it had come out, and I will happily say I'm really pleased with the result. I am glad I picked this livery because the unusual colours give a very distinctive paintjob that really does stand out. Perhaps not a description that would usually be desirable for camouflage, but for my needs, it's perfect. I really, really do like it!

 

There are a few details to add before it can get a gloss coat for the decals, in particular some black paintwork in front of the cockpit and at the base of the tail. Bit that's for the next update. For now, her's how she looks with her camo dress on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two other lessons for me to take from this. The first is with the wavy borders separating the camo from the aluminium on the tank. I used tape for those but worms where the camo colours meet eachother. It would be a more consistent result if I had used worms all round. In hindsight that seems logical but I just didn't think of it at the time.

 

The other lesson was with the borders. The worms take up space, and mark the boundary with their outside edge. I was aware of this when laying them down but even so, the dark brown areas are a bit smaller than intended in some places. I didn't make enough allowance for the thickness of the blu-tak strips. I am still happy with the result though.

 

It will be a few days before it gets masked up for the black, and then I'll leave it again for at least a week before I gently try get a gloss varnish on it. I've painted up a test piece which I can use first to make sure the varnish doesn't melt the Model Air paint, but other than that, it's on the home stretch now. Just the weapons to get painted, a few details, decals and top coats and she'll be ready to go on the flight line. It will take a while to get there, but most of that time will be waiting for paint to cure or varnish to harden.

 

[Serkan Sen]

The paint work looks very eye catching. Nice job!..

Serkan

[kiseca]

There are some updates, it's been a couple of productive weeks for me with the Mirage.

 

Black paint on the nose was done. When that was dry, it was time for a gloss coat to be ready for the decals. The tail decals are pretty big, they cover nearly the whole fin so I wanted to try keep the risk of silvering down as best I could.

 

On the whole the decals went on smoothly but there were two exceptions. One of the borders on the wing root went a bit wobbly and it took me so long to sort it out that it stuck fast before I was happy. It's a bit wavy. The other exception was a bigger problem. The big decal on the starboard side of the tail has to cover a bump - the rudder actuator - and while trying to get it to sit flush I ruined the decal completely. Luckily one of the other liveries has an almost identical tail decal. It's just missing the identification number. Unfortunately I couldn't even salvage that from the original decal so the starboard side just has to do without a "653".

 

One other point of note is that two of the decals go on the sides of the ejection seat headrests, but they aren't shown on the destructions when the seat is assembled, so by the time I was aware of them when I saw them labelled on the livery images, it was way too late to add them. The sides of the seat are very visible through the sides of the canopy too so it's a bit of a shame, but I don't want to crack it open to add them. There's a bit of filler around that area to make it all fit, so I don't want to mess with it.

 

With the decals done I gave it a pin wash to bring out the panel lines a bit more. Washes and weathering are my weakest skills in modelling, and panel lines in particular have been very hit and miss for me. I've generally tried over-the-counter washes, and once or twice I've tried making one from thinned paint. This time I decided to try with pastels. I tried just drawing them on when doing the fuel tank, but it wasn't working that well so I watched some Youtube and on the basis of that, made a wash out of pastel shavings, water, and dishwashing liquid. It probably helps that the model is all light colours, I have a better hit rate on light colours, but I'm happy with both the results and the control I had so I'll stick with this method for now. The result is a bit more subtle than it looks in the photos but it's just about exactly where I want it.

 

 

 

Waiting in the tent for its final varnish

 

With the wash done and a few other details, it was time for the final coat. I gave it a couple of coats of Newton and Windsor (or is it Windsor and Newton?) matt varnish to seal the decals and wash in and get the get the desired finish. Then it was time for one of my favourite milestones on any build... removing the mask from the glasswork! I'm always a bit worried that some disaster has been hidden for weeks beneath the canopy masking but it was all fine.

 

With the matt finish on and the canopy on show and buffed up, this build is just about done. Landing gear and tank are on and the model sat on its wheels for the first time. Now it's just waiting for the exhaust can, four bombs, and two wingtip AAMs and it will be all done.

 

 

 

 

 

[exdraken]

Great work!!

[Sturmovik]

1 hour ago, kiseca said:

The big decal on the starboard side of the tail has to cover a bump - the rudder actuator - and while trying to get it to sit flush I ruined the decal completely

Just as a heads up, try using a decal softener (such as Microsol or Mr. Mark Softer) if the decal goes over prominent bumps. I used the first one on a Revell Spitfire IX, and the decal conformed very well to the lower wing's bumps. Though I'm sure you already know this. Another trick would be to paint the marking. Takes more time, but you won't have to deal with the drying time of the softener.

[Serkan Sen]

Looks very good. Nice job!..

[Biggles87]

Very nice!

 

🇺🇦

[kiseca]

16 hours ago, Sturmovik said:

Just as a heads up, try using a decal softener (such as Microsol or Mr. Mark Softer) if the decal goes over prominent bumps. I used the first one on a Revell Spitfire IX, and the decal conformed very well to the lower wing's bumps. Though I'm sure you already know this. Another trick would be to paint the marking. Takes more time, but you won't have to deal with the drying time of the softener.

 

Thanks, it's a good point and I do indeed use Microsol, and it really helps. I think part of my problem though is that I also used Microset, and on a couple of occasions on different models I've had a problem where the decal has partially stuck solid to the model before I've finished getting it into position - or while, as in this case, I've been trying to smooth it into the various contours. When I say stuck solid, I mean not even masking tape will pull the stuck portion off. I don't know if it's the Microset making that happen, maybe reacting with the varnish or something, but I've seen a few others on here warn about using Microset, so I just used water alone from that point and then used Microsol to soften all the decals once they were in place and had dried off just a little, to help them settle in to the contours and grooves.

[Serkan Sen]

21 hours ago, kiseca said:

Washes and weathering are my weakest skills in modelling, and panel lines in particular have been very hit and miss for me. I've generally tried over-the-counter washes, and once or twice I've tried making one from thinned paint. This time I decided to try with pastels.

I had some nasty experiences with acrylic, enamel and oil paint washes. I ruined one of my build because of oil wash. Since then I am using the primary school aqua colors (watercolor but not the acrylic!)  and this is very forgiving. All you need to do to remove the wash on an area is to wipe off with moistened paper towel or simply wash the entire plane under tap water...

Serkan

[kiseca]

And this one is finished. Tailpipe was the last bit to do. Took me a while because the colour contrasts were too much.. I made the dark bits too dark, and I wanted to bring out the panel lines a bit more because it looked more like a cheap, banded bi-metal finger ring than a jetpipe. So it's had a few sessions with various washes, pastels, Tamiya powders and varnishes before it got to a point I was happy to put it on the jet. It's a cozy fit so I haven't had to glue it on, which is good because it's actually quite a lousy looking design (interior is particularly crap) so I may well replace it with an aftermarket one at sometime in the future. The next F.1 I build will certainly have an aftermarket tailpipe, and possibly windshield and canopy too. I'm quite happy with the kit provided windshield but I have read that it is too wide, and once I'd taken the photos I can now see this in the front views. It's good enough for me, but on the next build I'll be looking to see what difference aftermarket bits can make.

 

Anyway here's the RFI thread. Thanks to you all for joining me on this journey.