Lee 1/72 Dassault-Breguet Mirage 2000D

LEE 1:72 DASSAULT BREGUET MIRAGE 2000D

Reviewer: Myself (smakr@bigpond.com)
Kit Built July 2001, and Review submitted: 30 August 2001

Important Preamble:
I should say from the outset that this is not a kit I purchased, rather it was a gift, so before you start sending in emails claiming SMAKR supports pirates....!! :-) In any event it is always good to keep an open mind and build these types of kits, even if it is a one-off to provide further information to you about how the kit stacks up. For the record I understand it was about was about $6AUD from a "Cheap as Chips" store (which is even cheap here!).

Aircraft:
The Mirage 2000D variant is essentially an all-weather interceptor designed for the French Air Force to carry out the duties similarly to the Tornado. It was developed from the 2-seat Mirage 2000N nuclear armed variant, which in turn was derived from the Mirage 2000B two seat trainer.

The Kit:
I don't know much about the company Lee, but I have it under good advisement that they are a Chinese company who make "cheap" copies of real kits, or in layman's terms "pirated copies". I can neither confirm nor deny this and would be happy to receive comments from Modellers out there who know for sure. With this in mind I opened the box and was not surprised to see a clearly cheap looking mold in soft plastic. While I do not know for sure the origins of this kit, I am pretty sure Esci have a Mirage 2000D in their stocks (or even Italeri) and the instruction sheet is clearly a copy of an Italeri instruction sheet (you can even find the word Italeri with the painting symbols!!).

Everything comes loose in the box, that is, not packaged in any bags. The two main sprues contain about 55 injection molded parts in a soft, cheap feeling, medium grey styrene. Panel lines are all engraved, but they give off a smudge effect, as they are a bit shallow and a bit wide, again a little cheap looking, panel lines generally match up but in a couple of spots they don't when dry fit testing the fuselage halves. Some very small amounts of flash are on the parts which will require cleaning off, but nothing to be too concerned about. Ejector pin stubs can be found on the insides of all the parts, most of them are just the usual round circles, but a couple are studs, and require removing, again no real problems here. There are a few pieces with sink marks and some flash is evident, mainly encumbering the stores. The clear sprue contains five clear parts, which are a bit distorted.

Instructions:
As already stated the instruction sheet seems to be a copy of an Italeri style sheet with Modelmaster paint range quoted and FS numbers where available. A sprue diagram is provided as well as a brief history of the aircraft. There are 8 Italeri-style assembly steps to follow, all of which are easy to follow with only the minor questionable exact positioning. There are four four-view profiles of the aircraft the kit provides for being 2 French AF, a Greek and Chinese example. Curiously there are no Chinese decals.

Construction:
Construction starts in the cockpit with the two three-piece seats needing to be first sub assembled. This is a little difficult because you have to line up carefully. I used the small glue tube provided in the kit and this worked well for the whole construction process - in fact it lasted right to the end without the need to use any other glue and without having any left! The instructions would have you believe there are molded on seat belts, there aren't, the seats are just styrene and then go into the respective cockpit tubs for pilot and rear seater. Control columns are provided for both crew but an instrument panel is only provided for the pilot. There is no console or side panel detail, so decals and or scratchbuilding techniques will be called upon here to spruce it up. The tub fits well inside the fuselage half and the dashboard/HUD panel is ready to be placed on once the fuselage halves are affixed together. The interior was essentially given a dark grey wash almost to the point of being black, which is what the instructions advise the interior should be (black).

The engine is two-piece, being the exhaust cowling and the exhaust fan and these go together okay. I painted the fan aluminium and matt black inside the exhaust with the standard gun metal on the outside. This was going to be a bit of a kitbash so I wasn't going to spend time putting extra detail into it. The instructions suggest encasing the exhaust assembly when you put the fuselage halves together, but you can in fact put it on afterward. The downside is that either way it will be off-center when you attach the exhaust and I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to correct the positioning of the exhaust so it was plum centre. The Fuselage halves affix together okay but gaps result, requiring a bit of filling and sanding.

Next comes attaching the one-piece underwing delta section which is supposed to fit neatly into the belly cavity. It does, but only after sanding the mating areas a bit, a series of dry fit tests and then careful alignment. The instructions alert you to the fact that small holes need to opened up near the shoulder if one wants to attach the ECM pod (of course these are marked on the plastic too). The upper wing halves fit on a series of alignment rails which are on the wing roots. This fits okay, but again small amounts of filling required. The trailing edges of the wings needed a whole heap of pegs to hold it together as it was prone to show gaps. For wheels up modellers (as I am one!) test fitting and subsequent trimming of the gear doors will result in a fairly good fit to close up the wells.

The intakes are sub assembled with the main housing going onto the splitter plate, and a small canard onto the main housing. The sub assembly goes together okay but the holes for the canards were actually slightly larger so one had to slide the canard on carefully and hold it in place until it at least tacked dried. The small finlets for the dorsal fin fitted okay but do not line up perfectly when looking down from above. The intake assembly was then placed on the fuselage and this was a fairly poor fit, requiring careful coaxing and filling/sanding afterward.

A good range of underwing stores is provided in the kit, including Matra AAMs, Matra ASM's, large ventral tank and an ECM pod. The large ASMs are broken down into a number of pieces, two main fuselage halves with a fin already molded on, then you have to add the other two fins plus the rear tail section which is split into two halves as well. Even this wasn't a great fit, you needed to rotate the tail section until it matched the roundness of the missile fuselage and then some studious sanding was needed to smooth out the join. Perfectionists will discard the kit parts and raid their spares or a weapons set as these were a bit crude, even the ECM pod was a touch on the crude side. I painted the pod and AAMs in a light gull grey colour and the larger ASMs in silver according to the instructions and a couple of photos I had. The large ventral tank was a shocker in terms of fit. You get the choice of attaching it without its rear finlets, but if you decide to add on the fin you have to open up the rear area of the tank to slide it in - which essentially is an exercise in carving out flash. It was very crudely done by yours truly, so a heap of putty and some more sanding actually made it turn out rather well in the end. The pylons all attach to holes larger than their locating pins in the wings, but this was not really too much of a problem, just hold your finger in place while it tack dries, and that glue actually wasn't bad for this!

Smaller accessories were added to the aircraft such as the belly gun placements, nose pitot tube, small wingtip navigation fairings, rear underfuselage fairing and refuelling probe. None of these were very good fits, but a small bit of sanding to prepare the mating area helped solved this problem. The guns were particularly a bit crude and reference sources were needed for exact placement of the refuelling probe. The hole in the nose for the pitot tube needed a very slight enlargement so the tube would fit and needed careful placement and left to dry.

The whole canopy comes in a number of pieces, essentially a piece for each section. I worked from the rear canopy forward, and the resulting fit is fine in terms of placement but very small gaps were evident afterward. The windscreen does not match the same roundness of the nose area and thus results in a small gap requiring delicate filling to blend it into the fuselage.

I decided to depict the aircraft in Greek Air Force colours, so the undersides were painted Humbrol 127 Light Ghost Grey and the upper sides a Dark Ghost Grey (H128) and Intermediate Blue (H144) camouflage scheme. Overall construction was pretty straight forward and if not for a few gaps would have been suprisingly okay for the obvious cheapness the kit portrays.

Versions & Decals:
This is an interesting subject, as the instructions and the kit itself clearly market four examples, as stated above, but the decal sheet essentially only has Greek and French markings. The instruction sheet also comes across as being a multiple photocopied sheet, so it is a bit grainy and blotchy when it comes to providing sketches on the markings of the aircraft. Nevertheless the kit supposedly provides for a French AF demo aircraft in Dark Green (FS34079) and Dark Gull Grey (FS36231) camouflage; another French AF, NK2, example wearing a Sand (FS33531) and Dark Tan (FS30219) camouflage scheme over Light Ghost Grey (FS36375); a Greek Air Force version from 331 Mira in the scheme as I stated above and a Republic of China example in Mottled like effect of Intermediate Blue over Light Ghost Grey.

The decal sheet is small with not much other than the warning triangles, air force roundels, unit badges, serial numbers, navigation strips and wing walks for the versions supposedly produced. The decals and the instructions generally match in terms of which decal is for which aircraft example but there were some anomalies and it appeared the Chinese decals were not included. On the sheet the decals looked okay, but this is as good as it gets. My best advice is use another decal sheet! They conformed okay with decalfix, but there was so much carrier film that sometimes you had two or more decals on one set of carrier film, so you had to trim around them accordingly. The colours were off center on most of the decals, the navigation strips in particular were coloured outside the lines and the Greek Air Force roundels all had white edges from the print being off-center - in fact the fin flash of blue/white/blue looks like it is actually white/blue/white/blue. In a word, toss them!

Accuracy:
I have too much conflicting information about precise measurements to really comment on the accuracy of this kit in those terms but I suspect that it is acceptably accurate but not spot on. Various detailing bits are missing, such as the small antennae masts from the underside of the nose. When looking at it compared to lots of Mirage 2000D pictures there is also something just not quite right about the canopy section, it needs to look more sleeker than it appears to on my model, in fact it looks more like a Mirage 2000B than a D. I don't know whether this trait is also mirrored on the original molds of this kit (ie: Italeri, Esci version) but it was something that put me off a bit. Not the most convincing "D" replica I would bargain on.

Overall:
The kit is cheap in both quality and price and hardly stacks up to today's standards as far as accuracy, quality and ease of fit are concerned. In spite of what may be conveyed above, it was still a straight forward kit to put together with only minor hassles as far as fit etc are concerned. It's the type of kit you would buy only to smack something very quick together to give to your two year old to fly around the back yard. If you are serious about getting hold of a Mirage 2000D then this is not the kit for you, as the old adage says, you get what you pay for! Not Recommended.

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