1/48 Academy F-14A Bombcat

Gallery Article by Jason Foo on Jan 14 2010

 

This model was built straight out of the box and sadly required lots of effort to make it look half decent.  At first glance, the kit looked quite impressive judging by the packaging art and the multi-angle pictures on the side of the box.  Being a fan of Academy kits, I was quite excited when I purchased this kit as I’ve always wanted a 48th scale Tomcat. When the large parts were closely examined, for e.g. the fuselage, wings and nose, the panel lines were either very faint or missing and very inaccurate. Well, this can be fixed with a scriber of course but wait, there were more problems encountered during assembly.

The entire cockpit and forward fuselage construction was poorly design to start off with.  When the cockpit was fitted through the bottom part of the forward fuselage, I knew something wasn’t quite right.  The entire cockpit sits about 5mm too low into the fuselage and both the instrument panels don’t quite fit to the dash. The instrument panels had to be filed into shape to fit under the dash and the ejection seats had to be raised an extra 5mm or so. The dashes also required filing as they hang way over the instrument panels.  Furthermore, there were gaps everywhere between the top and bottom half of the forward fuselage.  A lot of sanding had to be done but still not a 100% perfect fit like the pictures on the box.

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The canopy frame outline was hardly visible and I had to put the ole scriber into use again.  The main landing gear struts sit too far out from the fuselage and the wheel wells also lack detail. The clear plastic landing light on the nose landing gear is also way too small.

Ok, enough bitching for now.  Let’s start with the cockpit, I’ve added extra seat belts made out of plastic bits, additional ejection seat handles at the front of both seats, a throttle lever on the pilot’s left side and a heads up display projection glass piece on the pilot’s dash.  I also had to remove the incorrect positioning of what seemed to be braided hoses at the top of the ejection seats and replaced them with thin lock-wire instead. Heating tubes were also included inside the canopy made out of plastic sprues and aluminium tape. The canopy actuator behind the co-pilot’s seat is also an add-on.

The inclusion of the open radome to display the radar is a nice option.  I added some thin wire on the bulk head to resemble electronic cables and a support bar to hold the radome up in position.

Extra hydraulic lines were added to all the landing gears and additional hoses and cables all made from thin aluminium wire were also included in the main gear wheel wells.  I used aluminium tape for the strut’s chrome bits and the indexer box on the nose gear was also detailed with the appropriate colours.

Almost all the panel lines had to be rescribed and were washed with diluted black acrylic paint and then wiped off with cotton buds and tissues lightly soaked in diluted methylated spirit.

The only thing worth mentioning about this kit is the weapon stores.  There are a few weapon combos to play around with and the parts are actually quite detailed and come with a nice set of decals.

All I can say is that this is the most “challenging” kit I have ever built.  Despite all the tantrums and time spent on its construction, I’m actually quite impressed with its final outcome considering that it was a fairly cheap model.  My only regret was that I should’ve read the kit reviews first before making the purchase.

Jason Foo

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Photos and text © by Jason Foo