crackerjazz

Geoff, Tracy, thanks! : )

Thanks for the kind words, fellas. Really glad you enjoyed the thread. I've posted the pics in the Display Case.

Hi my contribution to the Display Case -- at last : ) Not perfect but here they are anyway. Missing crew names as I'm still working on home-printed decals for those. But posting these here now anyway as that will probably be well off into the future. And my years are aeons so that may never be if I don't post them now. I don't have a good photography setup but this is the best I can do with the better lighting on an area of the workbench. And not to cause confusion but I might as well showcase my 32nd scale cockpit efforts -- as this A-7E will never see the light of day:

Hey John, thanks! : ) Here are some final shots..... Mounting 305 onto 301's spot just so I could take pictures of the underside. The spikes don't have the same spacing so they don't go in all the way. Next time I'll make all spike spacing standard so positions can be interchangeable. For 305, I used Hasegawa MERs and bombs and the bomb spacing is tighter compared to 301's intruder MERs with swaybraces that are a little to big (?). 305 back to it's spot with 301 breaking away. I had to space the mounts farther apart this time : ) I still have to experiment on printing my own decals for the crew names (decal set didn't have them) so that might take a while. For now off these Corsairs go to the Display Case section. Thanks to all who stopped by to give words of encouragement or just to have a peek every now and then. I had a fun time (and not so fun times) building these but I learned a lot, that's for sure. Hopefully I could build better SLUFs next time! : ) I bugged a lot of members like Fighting Eighty Four, chuck540z3, cema_ga, Aigore and Eric B. for weathering pointers (thanks for your assistance and patience, fellas!) and realized their works are just hard to replicate without a lot of practice and that I still have a lot to learn. I did spend extra long hours staring at pics of their work : )

Steve, John, Pete, thanks for the kind comments. Really appreciate it : ) Ok ready to mount the lights, pitot tubes, antennae and other stuff that launch into the ether and vanish. Hope I don't lose any. Pulled it off with losing any : ) The cannons on these Corsairs didn't have those bare-metal panels so I just needed to paint on the gun blast marks. Made some of those "trash can" style grab handles. The canopies don't sit perfectly but I'm fine with that. I once did the mistake of gluing on my Hasegawa Tomcat canopies, found some specks of dust inside the next day and couldn't do anything about them. So lesson learned -- no more glued-on canopies for me. My only regret is that I should have painted them along with the fuselage in one go so they'll have the same color. I don't understand why they're in another shade when it's the same brand of paint. And I believe the same bottle? All in all I think I'm good with these Corsairs. I couldn't find the pilot's names -- I'll print those someday -- just can't tell when that'll be so I'll take some shots for now and off they go to the Display Case section : )

Very interesting subject, Pete! Following along. You say you only have 4 or 5 images to work off of? That would drive me crazy. Here are some links I found in case you don't have them yet. I hope they're useful. https://www.sfxmodels.com/1962lem https://www.flickr.com/photos/x-ray_delta_one/35101946843/in/photostream/ https://bugsandrockets.wordpress.com/2016/09/10/1962-lem/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/gschroeder/29377980117 https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/lem.png http://heroicrelics.org/cradle/models-lm/dsc34738.jpg.html http://heroicrelics.org/nasm/models-lm/index.html

Absolutely fantastic work, Manfred! : )

Hey Tracy, great to hear they turned out well! I was worried the whole time they wouldn't print 😞

Hi AFM, Aigore, thanks guys! : ) Worked on the various protrusions: Re-shaped two pitot tubes by sanding the ends. These A-7s at that time had only one pitot tube on the port side. Also made some base plates. Will have to flatten the sheen. Cut up some styrene bits for the angle-of-attack probes as the kit didn't have any.

Wow! So these Tamiyas are real gems. And I almost chopped their noses off :( Those pics really helped, Zactoman, thanks!

Just my observation but I'm no Zactoman :) For the difference I'll have to measure again but just to illustrate -- in the picture below I used a line drawing from a Japanese book to compare as the drawing resembles Hasegawa measurements somehow. I overlayed the Tamiya forward fuselage just to show the difference and what corrections you may have to make if you do graft noses. Do keep in mind Tamiya used original Grumman plans as gtypecanare mentioned, so it could well be possible that the curvature I'm looking for is inherent only to photos taken of real F-14s and may be difficult to replicate on 1/48 models with camera distortions being different.

You meant the Tamiya kit. Sorry I wasn't clear -- it's the Hasegawa nose that's bigger. The step will require sanding down the sides of the cone to make it fit the Tamiya so it's a scary proposition. My half-built Hasegawas have their noses glued on already and I don't have any spares for testing, unfortunately. I'm kinda thankful for that, actually, as I don't have the skills at the moment to pull it off. It has to be done right as changing the nose changes the entire face.

Yes at the base of the radome. 2mm difference measured vertically. So you can't just saw off the Tamiya nose and replace it with the Hasegawa one-piece radome.

Thanks for those shots @Zactoman. For me I'm still trying to convince myself to love the Tamiya nose : ( Just for comparison purposes....it's this curvature below that I'm still straining to see on the Tamiya but is readily apparent on the Hasegawa. I was wondering if you notice it on the AMK? The Hasegawa nose makes me believe that there's a radar dish housed in there. I once wanted to graft the Hasegawa nose onto the Tamiya but there'll be a 2mm step to fix -- they were different by that much so it was just impossible to do. I don't want to go back to a Hasegawa just for the nose, though, and make all those corrections around the model -- the Tamiya kit is just so much easier to build. Gtypecanare did mention that Tamiya had access to the original Grumman blueprints and your comparisons put my mind at ease. I'm just curious to know, though, if you notice any such curvature on the AMK nose? It might be something that doesn't show on plan views.

Good info, thanks! : )