1/48 Hasegawa F-14A+

 converted to F-14B Jolly Rogers 

by John Kettenis

Kleine Brogel

Last year I was at the Spotters day at Kleine Brogel in Belgium when I saw for the first time the F14B Tomcat from VF-103, the Jolly Rogers.  Two planes attended the Spotters day, the CAG bird and a low visibility Tomcat, which carried a LANTIRN Pod.  A couple of weeks later, I bought the Hasegawakit 7023.  

Reference

The Hasegawa is a complete kit with a lot of details. You can build the A, B and D version of the Tomcat with it, including the two types of engines.

There are several items included, which belong to a F14B but which the manual doesn’t mention, for example the ALQ-126 Mid- & High-Band Antennas (wing-glove). Therefore I suggest you study reference pictures very well in order to build a real model.

Also the website of M.A.T.S, the F14 Tomcat Reference Work by Torsten Anft is a very good reference (http://www.anft.net/f-14). I also used the walkaround book by Verlinden with many detail pictures of the Tomcat.

Finally I used two pictures of a Vf-103 Tomcat, which flew during the Kosovo War.  

This F-14B of Vf-103 carries a LANTIRN pod on station 8B, balanced by an AIM-54C on 1B, but offensive armament is limited to a single Mk82 on station 3.

Vf-103 deployed to the Adriatic aboard the USS Enterprise with its LANTIRN-equipped F-14Bs, but did not drop bombs in anger.

I started to convert the F14D RIO cockpit from Black Box to the F14B version.

Therefore, I used some sidepanels from the original kit to replace the Black Box sidepanels. Also the Multiple Display Indicator from the Hasegawa kit had to be installed into the Black Box set, because the F14D version lacks this one. The same happened to Detail Data Display Panel.  

click on the image below to see larger photo

The conversion of the Black Box RIO cockpit form F-14D to the F-14B version. The grey panels are from the original Hasegawa set.

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Left side of cockpit	Right side of cockpit

  It was hard to fit the Black Box cockpit tub to the Hasegawa set. A lot of grinding had to be done, especially piece no. 4 “the Front Panel” of the Black Box set didn’t fit at all.

Construction of the main body was easy. Some grinding had to be done but this was minor.

I didn’t use the Eduard hinges for the geardoors, because these hinges were too small. I simply made the original hinges smaller by polishing them.

Gears

The landing gears took a lot of work because I also constructed the main hydraulic ducts. For this I used plastic tubes from 0,1 mm to 0,5 mm (Picture 6, 7 and 8).  

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Detail of main gear	Hydraulic lines

Nose gear

Wings, hook and airbrakes

There are two options to construct the wings, namely in spread position or in the full afterwards position (see picture directly below)

Model from above, wings in the aft position

Due to the fact that the plane with spread wings would be too large to fit in the display cabinet, I had to construct the lesser interesting position although in the spread position you are able to construct more details (extended flaps en slats).

The swing construction of the wing is solid so you will always be able the swing the wings to another position.

The arresting hook can be extended.  

The airbrakes can be constructed in the extended position, which I did, although I have never seen a Tomcat, parked on the flightdeck with extended airbrakes. But I thought it was more interesting to construct the airbrakes this way.

click on the image below to see larger photo Extended airbrakes

Weapons

I decided to make a Bombcat.  

In a magazine, I found a picture of a VF-103 Tomcat, flying above Kosovo with one Mk 82 bomb (see 1st picture in this article). This configuration I recreated, but choose to take two Mk83 Iron bombs.

Detail picture of bombs including ejection racks

I constructed two front pallets to hold the Iron Bombs. I made special ejection racks for the bombs, which are not included in the Hasegawa kit.

On the wing, the Tomcat on picture 1 carries one Phoenix missile (a Tomcat without a Phoenix isn’t a Tomcat) (see picture below on left). The other stations of the model got two Sidewinders and a Sparrow (see picture below on right).  

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Phoenix and Sidewinder missile	Sparrow and Sidewinder missile

On the aft position at the belly I glued another Sparrow.  

Weathering

The Tomcat on the picture had flown often, so it was very dirty.  I tried to weather the model exactly like the Tomcat on the picture. The housing of the engines is very dirty but to the front, the Tomcat looks clean. The missiles are relative clean and contrast with the bodywork.

I gave the model a flat coat.  

John