1/48 Hasegawa F-14A Tomcat

It's big, it doesn't fit into my display case. It's another US airplane. It's another dull, boring grey model. It's well aged... But it's Tomcat...you can't have a model collection without Tomcat!

Few years back a bought an open unassembled kit of 1/48 Hasegawa's Tomcat. I hesitated for a long time to start building it and this winter it finally came up to my schedule. It was a though one. Back in my childhood I assembled one Italeri's Tomcat in 1/48 and one Academy's in 1/72 scale. I never had a chance to wrestle with Hasegawa's 1/48. My used kit missed some parts, other parts were deformed or bent, and complicated model itself asked for a lot of filling and sanding. Wheel bays and air intakes took a lot of nerves, but it came to look like a decent airplane in the end.
I intended to put different marking but when I put old decals into the water they just disintegrated. So I managed to get new decal sheet from friend's Tamiya kit, together with his Phoenixes and Sparrows (my Hasegawa came without weapons).

In the end, after three months of production, this old cat did it's first landing (as shown in the pictures:).

12 additional images. Click to enlarge.