[Erik Zwaan]

Hello PM's,

After a short break, it’s time for a new build. My youngest son would like an aircraft in his room so I changed my plans a bit as I had planned to build something completely different, which will have to wait a little while. The perfect solution to this is one of Yoav’s models and I chose for the Mirage 3C.

Yoav’s models have great skin details, with weathering and shadow effects, which make them beautiful on display and the fact that they don’t have landing gears mean that the aircraft has to fly. Great!
The original is scale 1:30 and I downscaled it to 91% of the original size to get 1:33, so it will make good comparison to e.g. the F104G model I just completed.

Based on Yoav’s information, the aircraft saw service during the Yom Kippur war in October 1973. I was 9 years old at the time and do not have much recollection of this, other than images on TV I vaguely remember. As some western countries supported Israel during this war, amongst others The Netherlands, the Arab nations closed the oil tap and as a result this forced the Dutch government to curbing car traffic to save on petrol. In November-December 1973 people were not allowed to use their cars on Sundays, to the Dutch public known as the “autoloze zondagen” (car free Sundays). So families took on for a stroll or cycle tour on motorways on Sunday afternoons and enjoyed the eerie sound of silence. This I still very vividly remember. A very strange experience, probably best illustrated by the pictures below, which appeared in newspapers at the time (not me or my family though although it could have been).

OK, so far for the introduction; time to start building. After spraying the sheets with egg shell matt varnish, the first parts of the ejection seat are ready. Tamiya German Grey XF63 seems like a good choice for edge coloring.

Cheers,
Erik