I bought the Tomcat
book “Bye-Bye Baby” a few years ago which was released upon the retirement
of the Tomcat from the US Navy. If ever one needed motivation to build a model,
this book has to be it. The photography is quite outstanding and the production
of the book puts it in the coffee table book category. Having completed reading
the book, I dug deep into my cupboard and extracted Hasegawa’s 48th scale
F-14A Tomcat. The build has taken close on two years of on and off building. In
typical Hasegawa fashion, the engineering of the fuselage is complex (maybe
necessitated by the Tomcat’s intrinsically complex design) and had me
frustrated on more than one occasion.
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I used the
Aires resin cockpit set – although the kit cockpit is good, the Aires
rendition provides that bit of extra dimension. The fit of the kit
windscreen over the Aires instrument panel coaming was not the best and
required the application of quite a bit of Milliput to fair in the
windscreen to fuselage.
What I like about the Hasegawa Tomcat is the option to have everything
open and dangling – I left the air brakes open and placed the flaps and
slats in the down position, wings swept fully forward. The red interiors
to the air brakes and the red trim on the flaps and slats add a nice level
of colour to an otherwise drab grey aircraft. I also used a combination of
exhausts – one in open and one in closed position as was regularly seen
on F-14’s taxiing on an aircraft carrier.
To add extra interest I decided to use a low vis grey camouflage scheme
with high vis VF-84 Jolly Rodgers markings (from the kit decal sheet).
Although the instructions note that the camouflage for this colour scheme
should be the old gloss gull grey / gloss white scheme, I have several
photos of A-models in service with the high vis markings and toned down
grey. One of these pics is of an F-14 from VF-84 flying in formation with
a Croatian Air Force MiG-21 – who would have thought…..
I used XtraColour
gloss enamels to airbrush the aircraft. I started by pre-shading using dark grey.
This was followed by an application of thinned base grey colour. To represent
random touched up areas where fresher paint would have been used on the real
aircraft (photographs help a lot here !), I used a lightened shade of the base
grey colour applied with the airbrush. The touching up on US Naval jets is most
noticeable along the panel edges. The kit decals went down reasonably well on
the gloss paint using MicroSol. Final weathering, highlighting of panel lines
and panel fading was done using pastels. This is usually a long process and took
me at least 5 hours always being careful not to have fingers come in contact
with pastelled areas. I was quite happy with the result – this is my first
attempt at a low-viz grey USN scheme.
Weapons selection was from Hasegawa’s separate USN weapons boxing. I decided
for a mixed fit of two AIM-7, two AIM-9 and two AIM-54 which seemed to be pretty
standard. I incorporated two nuts into the inside of the lower fuselage decking
to allow the aircraft to be mounted by screws onto a base – the intention is
to frame this and hang it on a wall as I have now run out of storage space!
All in all a challenging but satisfactory build.
Malcolm Reid
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