This is Academy’s 1/48 F-14A Tomcat done OOB with kit decals for VF-143 “Pukin Dogs”. Yeah, I know it’s to clean for a Navy plane…but what can I say but it is what it is. Cheers…Jerry 
That is one sweet Tomcat! Don’t let anyone give you any guff about it being too clean. When they get to the boat, they look that good…for about a day:D Great work!!
Eddie
That is a great looking 'Cat! Like Eddie said, everything was clean once, so don’t worry about it! Very nice build!
I like it. VF-143 has always been a favorite of mine. Next to VF-111 that is.
K5ikl,
Nice looking Tomcat there! Very nice indeed. As far as it being too clean, the gloss gull gray and white birds were alot cleaner and easier to keep clean than the flat camo birds. Most of the grease and such wiped off of them while it kinda just wiped into the camo birds. Imagine wiping a greasy hand print off of a car fender with gloss paint and then one with primer paint, pretty much the same effect.
Sweet Tomcats
You did a GREAT Build
Bud
Thanks for the comments guys… VF-111 is another one of my favorites too. Funny thing though in all the years I have been building I haven’t done a VF-111 aircraft. God knows I have enough VF-111 decals to do several. LOL As to the clean build, the guys in our model club say that mine are refurbished and on there way to a museum somewhere… Cheers, Jerry
I like it! Very nicely done and great chioce of markings.[tup]
You can also tell them it is the CAG bird and he is on his way to the Navy Comanders Conference. A group of judges look over all the aircraft and pick one as “Best in Fleet”.
Jerry,
You did a great job on this Tomcat…As far as the lack of corrosion on this bird, it’s nice to see one that looks factory freash for once.
Below is a link to some pics of several of VF-143’s F-14B’s as the squadron began their transition to the Rhino. You’ll see that the “Dog’s” among all the other F-14 squadrons painted one of their jets with the throw back paint scheme. It was very popular and a lot of decals guys like Two Bobs and VF Decals came out with throw-back sets.
The tactical gray paint which is supposed to be less absorbant by radar collected dirt, fuel, hydraulic fluid, bugs, you name it like you wouldn’t believe. As an F-14 Plane Captain I went through many a green scrubby pad trying to clean the tacgray paint of the Turkey - pain in the butt!
Again, great job!
http://www.alert5.com/gallery/1972PukinDogs-2/f_14b_CTArNG_VF_143_06
Great looking Tomcat!! And like everyone else has said, the gloss gray birds were way easier to keep clean then the Tac gray birds. The tac Gray bird would get dirty by just sitting in the hangar, they were dirt magnets! There was only two ways to get a TAC gray bird clean, re-paint it or “burn it” when you washed it (all you former Naval Aviation Types out there know what I mean). BTW, just a little comment about the speed brake if you would pardon me. I noticed that the top one is open but the bottom one was closed. Just to let all the tomcat fans out there now that they were connected together, i.e. if the top is open then the bottm is opened also and vice versa. 
Reddog, Thanks for the info. I’ll remember that next time. Seeing as how Academy left the bottom one as panel lines I just automatically did the top one open since it gave that option. Should have closed it. Guess I missed that in my references. Cheers, Jerry
I bet you used love the greasy glove prints left by the blueshirts and to a smaller degee the yellow shirts? If fact I’ve seen these guys use their greasy glove drawing cute little picture on a bird. I guess in return, we got to do the flight deck washdowns.
Sorry for the hijack.
Eddie
Reddog,
We had a knucklehead in the squadron take a couple of the spray cans of aircraft cleaner home to wash his truck. Needless to say it wasn’t much to look at after that!
Eddie, Yep, caught a few blue/yellow shirts doing that to our jets. To get them back we just let our jets leak all over the place so they had to was the deck just about every other night. Tracey, The worst I did was try to use canopy polish on my windshield, had little white spot for four days until it rained.