I built this (Hasegawa 1/72 F-14B, the new molds) for my brother, starting in fall of 2007, intending to give it to him for Christmas that year. For various reasons, the project took way longer than I expected, and I wasn’t able to finish it until April this year (and I didn’t get to working through the photos till now, either). I didn’t add any detail beyond that in the box, but I made a few other modifications to the kit and spent a lot of time on the finish. I am pretty pleased with it, as is my brother.
Crew from another kit…either the “old” Hasegawa F-14, or a pair of F-18s (don’t remember which). One of them wouldn’t fit, so he lost his legs… I modified the old-style helmets to better represent more modern ones. If you look closely, squint, and use your imagination, you can see skulls + crossbones on the back of their helmets, and patches on their shoulders. There were still a few details left to do when I took these photos (polishing visors, adding the dark grey “ears” to the helmets), but you can get the idea:
Cockpit is very basic, just what came with the kit:
I installed styrene tube in the port engine to accept a 1/4-inch acrylic rod to hold the model on a stand; the styrene mounts to a bulkhead forward:
One of my gripes with this kit is poor fit in a lot of places. One place it was really bad was the bulge where the leading edge of the wing goes into the wing gloves. Look at this gap!
I saw no such a gap on the real airplanes–which also had more of a bulge there than I have seen represented in any kit–so I cut out the offending portion and laminated some sheet styrene into a puck that I attached and sanded down to a more correct bulged and gapless shape. I didn’t get pictures of bare plastic after gluing the puck in or sanded, but here’s the section removed, and the puck separate. I also opened up the mounting slots on the wings to allow positioning them in the swept position–the unmodified kit wings are keyed to allow positioning them only in the forward or oversweep positions. Gimme a break, guys…95% of the world thinks these things look best with the wings swept back, and you don’t even provide the option?
Paint. I had a horrible time figuring out the right paints to use on this guy. The Model Master versions of the standard TPS paints didn’t look right at all–way too dark, and even purplish for the top color–even though they matched nearly perfectly with paint chips in the Monogram US Navy color schemes book. One possibility is scale effect, but I suspect it’s that the TPS fades so quickly in service that fresh, “correct” colors just look wrong (compared to what I recall from lots of airshows, and living nearby NAS Oceana in high school). I wanted to take my paint chips to the F-14 at the Smithsonian annex, but didn’t get around to it–it wouldn’t change what looks right anyway. So, I just tried different mixtures until I got something that looked right. Here’s a comparison of the final colors I used, tested on a derelict Kfir model, with straight TPS underside color (light ghost gray) in the F-14’s inlets; you can see that the light ghost gray on the F-14 is still darker than the blue-gray upper color I settled on with the Kfir.
Completion pictures up next (in just a few minutes).
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