Dassault Super Mystere

by Mick Evans

Fonderie Miniatures' 1/48 scale Super-Mystere is available online at Squadron.com

Here is my 1/48 scale Dassault Super Mystere by Fonderie Miniature.

The kit is a typical limited-run, multi-media product with injection moulded parts made from a soft styrene. In common with most other limited run kits, the parts require a lot of clean up and trial fitting before gluing.

The resin and metal parts are well moulded - as good as any that I have seen. The canopy was a vac-form with some moulding flaws and poor outlining.

The panel lines on the whole kit were heavy and in some cases were not a straight line. This required a bit of overall sanding, some filler, and a bit of rescribing to look good.

For a detailed look at the parts in the box, check out Brett Green's review elsewhere on HyperScale.

The kit went together quite well except for the left wing assembly.

The wings are slab moulded, in other words are not hollow when assembled. When the wings were trial fitted together at the wing root leading edge, a 5mm gap was evident at the trailing edge, and a 1cm gap at the wing tip. This was caused by a twisting and warpage of both the top and bottom wing halves. Compounding the problem, the area along the inner wing spar above the wheel well was 3mm thicker than the right wing.

Because of the slab moulding there was nothing that I could do to fix this other than remove plastic from the upper wing surface. I got out the heavy file and started to remove the lump until the left wing was the same thickness as the right wing, then I rescribed the surface detail. To fix the warpage I stood the halves in hot water, even boiled them for 2 minutes, but the styrene would not soften so that I could straighten them. As a substitute, brute force, Tenax 7R, and superglue was employed.

The wing is not perfect, but unless you look for the flaw, you would never know.

The instructions were a bit crude at times, leaving a bit of guess work to the modeller.

Some improvements were made, like a backing plate for the intake, drilling out the prominent engine cooling vents and some other scratch building.

No detail was given for opening the canopy and how it sits correctly when open. This sent me on quite a quest to find the detail, as I wished to show off the nice cockpit detail. The decals were quite good, including an Israeli option available. This is in the early 2 tone green and brown scheme with a grey underside. I wanted to do the 3 tone sand scheme with the light blue underside, just before conversion to the Shar with the extended jet pipe. I found a photo and scheme drawing for an Atar engined version in an old Scale Aircraft Modelling magazine.

The decals were all correct except for the aircraft number which came from my spares box.

I also replaced the AIM 9B sidewinders with some from a Hasegawa weapons kit, as those provided were a bit heavy and crude.

Except for the left wing and poor panel lines, the kit was as straight forward as a limited run multi media kit can be.

The finished product looks the brute that it was in real life. It will look very much at home beside the new Mirages due shortly and the Hi Tech Mystere IV.

I spent about 25 hours on the kit and I am happy with the finished product.

I can highly recommend this kit to experienced modellers who are Israeli or French aviation enthusiasts.

 

Model, Images and Text Copyright © 2003 by Mick Evans 
Page Created 15 January, 2003
Last Updated 17 March, 2004

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