Kfir C7, 543 Zohar, Arava Guardians Squadron, IAF, 1990

I have a thing for delta aircraft. While my blog doesn’t show it, yet, this is my third delta winged aircraft. Completed back in January 2018.

The Subject

I’ll paraphrase this wrong but as I understand it, the Isreali Air Force procured some French made Mirage III fighters and unable to get improved variants they decided to reverse-engineer the design while also improving upon it. The result was the Kfir series which eventually competed or export sales with Dassault’s Mirage series. Besides avionics a big improvement was the use of the American made J-79, also used on IAF F-4 Phantoms and for which the IAF had quite a few spares.

By the 90’s the IAF was using the F-15 for interception and air superiority, relegating the Kfir to an air-to-ground mission. Side number 543 is representative of this mission. By 2000 the KFIR had been replaced by the F-16.

The Model

This is the AMK kit of the Kfir C2/C7. Detail is extensive, fit is very tight (the thickness of airbrushed paint causing me problems). I determined quickly that I needed to study the build sequence and carefully dry-fit every part.

Five options are available, 3 each C2 variants, 2 C7 variants and 3 of the variants are exports — the USA (used by ATAC as a contract aggressor unit) , Ecuadorian and Colombian Air Forces. All are quite colorful and weapons options includes early/late load outs of both American-supplied weapons and indigenously developed weapons.

Care has to be taken with some of the weapons markings. The air-to-air missiles are painted as training rounds (blue tubes with no warhead nor rocket motor); to be accurate they should be a medium gray. The gravity LGBs are correctly a dark olive green.

I had to break out my 0.15 Harder and Steenbeck airbrush for the camouflage scheme. It’s been quite a while since I had to paint a scheme with noticeable overspray. I got the hang of low pressure, thin paint, build color in layers, quite quickly. Decals went on with no trouble at all using just Micro set/sol.

Summary

This was an enjoyable build. As noted above the fit was a very tight, so work slowly to ensure no misalignment issues. Sometimes a light swipe of a sanding stick makes a huge difference.

Thanks for looking…