Drew T.

Thanks Thadeus! It’s been a while, but I now have everything pained. To build an initial patina on the gray camo, I started with a base coat of black Mr. Surfacer 1500 and applied a speckled coat of white by spraying through a dryer sheet. I then sprayed a highly thinned coat of Mr. Color C308 light ghost gray on the underside and C307 dark ghost gray on the top. To add more texture, I sprayed a very highly diluted black as well as white paint in an irregular pattern. Another very light coat of the light and dark ghost gray blended everything in.

Thanks for the nice words everyone! I’ve made a few more areas to detail before moving on to painting. F-14s use a string in front of the windscreen to measure the amount of sideslip when landing. I replicated this with very thin stretched sprue. Note that I roughly tape over the cockpit to keep debris out and eliminate risk of damage during construction. I am using Quickboot’s TCS and wanted to replicate the mirrored appearance in the scope. I first painted the front section behind the lens black. I then used my Anyz chrome decal sheet and punched out a circle a

Thanks Greg! After I found a photo of that exact plane with that loadout, I had to replicate it!

Thanks for the kind words everyone! I’ve made some more progress on this. With the cockpit complete, I moved on to construction of the air intakes. Tamiya has a decent amount of detail in this area, but I’m following the build in Kris Sieber’s excellent book where he documents his build of this kit. I basically copied what he did to improve this area. I also used Reskit’s single-piece intakes, which eliminates the need to remove the longitudinal seam from the two halves in the Tamiya kit. I painted the intake parts with Mr. Color C69 off-white. I like to u

HI Everyone, I’ve got the cockpit installed and finally have the nose section finished. Here’s the overall result. However, before installing the cockpit, I took the opportunity to add some detail in the bay where the boarding ladder is stored since I’m going to have the ladder extended. I’m using the 3D printed ladder and steps from Model On Details. The steps make for a tight fit with the Eduard cockpit since the steps are located right against the cockpit sidewalls, but with some careful griding, I was able to get everything to fit. Af

Interesting! I've seen an interview of Lt. Slade's POW experience at the hands of the Iraqis and it sounds like he had a pretty horrible experience. I didn't realize plane 212 was the one he and Lt. Jones went down in. Cool! I knew I would screw up and confuse his call sign with his real name. He's got a great collection of Tomcat photos posted on his Facebook page. VF-32 seems to be the most photographed Tomcat squadron of DS, and that has to be due to Dave Parsons' photo collection.

Thanks Aaron! I'll suck it up make the Reskit ones work, it's easier than trying to sell them for what I paid for them. Hi GW, that's interesting. What I have read is that at the time, they would fly with the ECA (expanded chaff adapter) on the left front Phoenix rail and the AN/ALQ-167 jammer on the right front Phoenix rail like this image shows of Gypsy 110. https://dstorm.eu/pictures/nose-arts/f-14/161140_1.jpg I was trying to avoid this loadout as I can't find any good photos of the ECA or the rack used to attached the jammer pod to the Pho

Thanks for the nice words everyone! I have not had this issue with the Eduard cockpit. However, I took great pains to make sure I had it located correctly. I think if they had put a little more effort into the design of the set to interface with the Tamiya kit, it would have been much easier to use. Yeah, I'm leaning towards this scheme. The low-viz jets got really grubby during the high tempo of operations during Desert Storm, so this gives me lots of opportunity for weathering. Unfortunately, I won't have any use for the parts I bought from the late F

Thanks Steve and Aaron! Dang, I just received the Reskit missiles in the mail yesterday and the are still multi-piece. If I had known the Flight Line version was single piece, I would have gone for that one. At least the Reskit ones do match the Tamiya missiles in length.

Hi Everyone, My new build is Tamiya’s excellent 1/48 F-14A, but to make things interesting, I’m adding a metric crap ton of aftermarket goodies. Below is everything I have so far. I have both the Reskit and Katran exhausts, but I haven’t decided which one I’m going with yet. Also below are the Eduard Phoenix missiles, but I found out after I took this photo that these are too short, so I purchased Reskit’s version. I messed up buying the original release of the F-14A since I’m doing a Desert Storm build, as most of the Tomcats by this time had the ECM

Thanks!

Thanks for the kind words everyone!

Thanks!

Well, I was going to do another in progress post, but ended up finishing this one out. Below is a link to the final result:

Thanks Crease!