1/72 Liberty Quality Kit AMX A-1

Gallery Article by Laurent Stern on May 25 2010

 

No plastic kit of the Alenia-Aermacchi-Embraer AMX attack aircraft exist apart from the old Aeroclub kit.  Warrior Models or Cunarmodel made some resin kits but they represent Italian aircraft (which carry an M60 gun), not Brazilian planes (which carry DEFA cannons).  Liberty Quality Kit offers the possibility to make a FAB aircraft with the low-viz camouflage so I thought I'd give it a try.

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The cockpit is very poor: no detailing at all, the pilot is a copy of a Matchbox generic jet pilot and the seat looks more like a STENCEL than like a MB Mk.10. I added some details and used a Pavla Mk.10L seat.

The small parts are very rough. Cleaning them up is difficult as the resin is brittle (my front landing gear leg broke in three parts). No weapons are provided apart from the underwing fuel tanks. There are no panel lines under the fuselage and scribing them would have been extremely difficult (remember it's a resin kit).

The kit comes with an FCM decal sheet specially printed for Liberty Quality Kit and I've experienced great difficulties with it: some roundels didn't want to leave the paper, all decals had bits that came off on the edge and the big ones didn't stick well so I had severe silvering on them :(

I've scratchbuilt an arrestor hook since Liberty Quality Kit didn't provide one. It wasn't an easy task: I didn't find AMX drawings including a  bottom view...

This is the first resin kit I've built, it wasn't a lot of fun but I now have a Brazilian AMX in the display case. Now if Italeri, Trumpeter or someone else would please do a plastic model of this aircraft in any scale, I'd still be interested...

Laurent Stern

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Photos and text © by Laurent Stern