With Chris McDowell
The AMX International AMX is a ground-attack aircraft for battlefield interdiction, close air support and reconnaissance missions. As a result of a memorandum between Italy and Brazil for the type’s joint development in 1981, AMX International, an Italian-Brazilian joint venture, was formed to develop, manufacture, and market the aircraft. The AMX is designated A-11 Ghibli by the Italian Air Force and A-1 by the Brazilian Air Force. The AMX is capable of operating at high subsonic speed and low altitude, by day or night, and if necessary, from bases with poorly equipped or damaged runways. It possesses a low infrared (IR) signature and a reduced radar-equivalent cross-section to help prevent detection, while low vulnerability of structure and systems aid survivability and a compliment of integrated electronic countermeasures (ECM), air-to-air missiles and nose-mounted guns provide self-defence capabilities. (Source: Wikipedia)
A note from Geoff…
As we have the completed photos of Chris’s excellent build I want to show you a couple of these now so you can see how well it all turned out – nice work Chris!
Over to you Chris…
Kinetic released their AMX kit in 2015 and it is everything I’ve come to expect from a Kinetic release. The kit consists of over a 180 parts moulded in a light grey plastic, 15 etched metal parts on a small fret, and 13 clear parts, with markings for 3 aircraft.
The open-top box looks incredibly full on first opening it until you realise you don’t need quite a bit of it to build the single seat version, so there will be plenty left over for the spares box. At the time of writing, Kinetic have since released a two-seat trainer version that uses a lot of the same sprues, plus some of the extra sprues not needed for the single seat version (although I suspect you’ll still be left with a lot of extra parts with whatever kit you build).
The plastic looks well moulded with the crisp details you would expect from a new kit. Although on closer inspection you will notice that the mould seam lines can be a bit heavy at times, and there is a little flash here and there around most parts. The long and the short of it is, every part removed from the sprues required to be cleaned up, and every mating surface needed to be dry-fitted to ensure there was a good fit. I find Kinetic plastic can be a little soft, so be careful when cleaning up any of the parts.