1/48 Hasegawa F-14A Tomcat

Gallery Article by Malcolm Reid on Apr 8 2010

 

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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Photos and text © by Malcolm Reid