1/32 Trumpeter F-14D Tomcat

Gallery Article by Terry Chan on Aug 10 2010

 

I received this beautiful Trumpeter 1/32 F-14D kit last Christmas.  I immediately put it on the workbench and worked on it.  It was a brand new kit then, and there were no aftermarket accessories available yet.  But I wanted to put in my best efforts so I went with the following accessories which were almost all designed for the Tamiya 1/32 Tomcat:

  • Blackbox resin cockpit
  • Eduard photo etch cockpit set
  • Aires resin jet exhausts
  • CAM GBU-10 bombs
  • Zotz VF-2 Bounty Hunters decals

The kit's cockpit was very accurate, but its details wasn't as refined as Blackbox's.  Unfortunately the Blackbox cockpit set was a real challenge to install.  I made matters worse by also using the Eduard PE set, which also did not fit well to the kit it's not intended for.  In the end, a lot of dry fitting, filling and sanding finally made everything fit and I was happy with the results.

The kit's nose gear lacks a lot of details, so I had to scratch build it.  It took me a month to finally close the nose of the fuselage with the nose bay and cockpit in it.

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The jet intakes were also problematic.  The left and right intake trunks need to be reversed or they won't fit.  The intake ramps are molded at the wrong angle when views from the front, so you'll need to compensate for that when glueing them.  The intake side walls didn't reach all the way to the top so I had to scratch build them with styrene stock.  Fortunately the Aires resin exhaust fit very easily without any dramas.

The main gear wells, and main gears fit well and presented no problems.  The wings needed some filling especially around all the speed brakes.  The top and bottom fuselage halves (with the wings fitted) fit very tightly and required clamping, but otherwise presented no problems.

I wanted to finish my big Tomcat in a grungy low-visibility scheme, so I went with the VF-2 "Bounty Hunters" line jet last cruise scheme.  First I sprayed the base grey camouflage according to the FS numbers provided by the Zotz decal instructions.  Then using my fine tip airbrush, I randomly sprayed patches of Imperial Japanese Navy light grey to simulate USN anti-corrosion spot priming.  Then I blended in the spot priming with the camouflage using a grey filter.

The Trumpeter 1/32 Tomcat is a highly detailed and very complex kit.  It was the most challenging project I've taken on (including short run resin kits), but I love the satisfaction of owning a big, detailed, sexy and very dirty-looking Tomcat model.

Terry Chan

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Photos and text © by Terry Chan