1/72 IMC A-4E Ahit

Gallery Article by Carlo Morelli on Aug 20 2013

 

 

A-4E Ahit Israeli Air Force

Hi everyone.  This is my A-4E Ahit of the Israeli Air Force I built from the IMC kit in 1/72 scale. This IMC kit is a very old one, finding it in a store in Rome was a big surprise for me. IMC sold this kit during the sixties, so it has got an age of about 55-60 years! White plastic mould has got positive details and panel lines, lacks completely the cockpit and exhaust pipe, and the same for landing gear vanes. All these details have been added by myself, making them with plasticard and sprue. Open slats and flaps on the wing (a very nice feature of the A-4 Skyhawk, very visible due to the red color of the interior structure...) have been cut and repositioned. Despite the lack of details general shape and dimensions are correct and with a bit of attention is possible to obtain a good reproduction of the Skyhawk. Old kits usually have got one problem: the excessive thickness of the trailing edges of wings, stabilizer, rudder and mobile surfaces. The measure I take to reduce the bad impact caused by this is to paint with a dark colour (often dark grey) the out of scale edges... Also panel lines that are all positive have been painted with a 5-0 brush due to the fact is impossible to point out them with oil color wash. 

 

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The funny thing about this kit is the reproduction of battle damage.  The box gives you the alternative to build it stock or battle damaged and of course I choose the second option.  The Israeli A-4E was delivered in 1967, soon after the end of the Six Day War, when France posed an embargo on arms deliveries to Israel and it started to buy military equipment from the US.  The first batch of 48 A-4E, called Ahit by HHA, has no prolonged tail pipe or other modifications like the planes that will arrive in service later. They were soon sent in combat and were very active in the 1969-70 skirmishes against Egypt, called the "War of Attrition".  Many of them where damaged by Egyptian SAMs or by flak, like the example I reproduced. When a jet takes enemy hits, the first thing the pilot has to do is jettisoning all the external stores. However, I decided to make the model more nice and interesting that jettisoning the LAU-3 70mm FFAR rockets failed (due to unknown reason... Maybe an hydraulical failure caused by the damage that was sustained...).

I'm sorry about the non perfect quality of the pics, but I've got a bad camera and I hope to buy another soon. The problem is I waste all my money on kits! I hope you enjoy my A-4 best regards from Italy!

Carlo Morelli

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Photos and text © by Carlo Morelli