F-14A 160379

1
September 29, 2018
Huge amount of flash, warped pieces, erased engraving, the molds are old and the parts need work. Also, the drilling holes for the fuel tanks are seemingly not in a correct position, so these were plugged and I will not mount any droptanks..
2
September 29, 2018
Cockpit ready. I forgot part C21, behind the pilot seat, and will have to surgically insert it at some point (cut and paste, there's no way to wiggle it in).
3
September 29, 2018
Now this looks like a Tomcat.
4
October 15, 2018
Most of the work done on the cockpit.
5
October 15, 2018
Built up the wing hinges to try and hide the huge gap you get when retracting wings. I thought this was just my box, but from what I can see on other builds, it's a problem with the Hasegawa kit.
6
October 15, 2018
Uneventful painting and decaling. The red on the HB decals doesn't match the Hasegawa maroonish red, I guess I'll have to live with it.
7
October 20, 2018
Nearing completion. Fixed a few errors, namely repainting the wing spoilers in white and moving the nose numbers to the correct position. Some more work needed on the canopy, gear doors, antennas, seats, position lights.
8
October 24, 2018
Seats and canopy in place, pitots glued, model done!
9
October 24, 2018
10
October 24, 2018
Will work on a couple more planes before I try a proper photo shoot.
11
December 21, 2018
12
December 21, 2018
13
December 21, 2018
14
December 21, 2018
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December 21, 2018
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December 21, 2018
17
December 21, 2018

Pierre
It's still buildable, it just needs extra work and careful panelling work (which I had trouble with, the Hasegawa engraving is very fine and hard to reproduce).

I have since bought a few old ones on Ebay, the three I have from 1990 are fine, the one from 2006 already shows the same mold wear.

15 October 2018, 06:59

Spanjaard
hummmmm i have checked one of mine, and the instructions say 2013..... panels look ok, but yes, quite shallow. a bit of flash is present, so maybe not so bad at the end. maybe they did new tooling at some point?

15 October 2018, 20:56

Rex
They didn't re-do this tooling,,,,,they created another tooling altogether. Then, every once in a while, they popped these old tooled kits into boxes and sold them, even though there is a newer tooling available.

It is just like 1/72 scale Hasegawa Phantoms, the older F-4E tooling was still being sold in newer boxes, even though they had a newer tooling of the F-4 series already released.

The big clue is usually the price, if you are getting a Tomcat or a Phantom for what seems like about 1/2 price, in a new box, it is almost always the old tooled kit, not the newer one.

If you want a flash free old tooled Tomcat, you need to get the oldest release you can find,,,in this case, find one in a Minicraft-Hasegawa box, the molds were much fresher than "Atlantic" and "Pacific" releases in boxes that only say Hasegawa on the box.

15 October 2018, 23:50

Spanjaard
thanks Rex!

15 October 2018, 23:52

John Thomas
Nice work

16 October 2018, 00:22

Pierre
@Spanjaard, yup, this one is from 2013 as well. The panel problems are concentrated on the portside air intake (they're almost totally worn out) and on the upper and lower fuselage pieces (aft portside especially was warped on my kit, which I chose to reshape using epoxy).
The thing still builds into a Tomcat fine, it just makes a tricky kit trickier 🙂

16 October 2018, 06:28

Spanjaard
thanks for the info 🙂

16 October 2018, 20:15