Back in early April I won a Mirage 1/48 PZL-23 Karas kit on ebay - it arrived today. The first think I noticed was that, although in the picture the box looks to be shrink-wrapped, in reality only the top of the box is shrink-wrapped. Quite obviously, someone cut around the bottom edge of the box so they could open it and still make the box look like it was never opened.
Now, for all I know this could be the way Mirage ships their kits - but I doubt it. And when I opened the box, underneath the instruction booklet was an open plastic bag that contained the clear parts - I'm guessing it originally contained the PE parts and decals as well, but they were scattered around the box. The PE sheet is somewhat bent, but not ever having dealt with PE before I don't know if any of the parts themselves are damaged beyond use. The bend isn't that bad, however, so the odds are that the PE parts are ok.
While the seller did not advertise the kit as still sealed or NIB, the fact that he included a photo of the box "still shrinkwrapped" would certainly lead one to believe that that is what he wanted potential bidders to think. I have no idea if the seller frequents the FSM forums - I certainly hope not, since I'd hate to think that anyone here would pull something like this! I'm keeping the kit, since it's one I always hoped would be produced (the curious design of the plane has intrigued me for years), and as far as I can tell all the parts are present.
Well, I wanted to vent where my frustration would be understood. I'm done now. And by hte way, this looks like a pretty nice kit. I don't plan on trying to build it for quite a while - the multimedia factor, along with the language factor (while the instructions have some English, for the most part they're either in Polish or without words at all), makes me want to get a decent amount of experience under my belt before I tackle this baby!
Has anyone here built this kit yet? What were your experiencees?