Not much time for model building last week as daughter had high fever and ear infection but nevertheless I managed to finish something during the weekend.

Dryfitted the wings and tailerons and attached the fins - Tomcat, baby!

Was playing with different shades of metallic colours, picking out single petals, and attacking those with washes. I'll further putt a matt coat on them as they're too shiny now and probably add a little more staining.

And dryfit of the nozzles - They look really nice attached to the fuselage. Had to bypass instructions a bit so I can remove and install them later in the build.

Nice!

Awesome progress!

I've hit the builder's block with this build when it came to decals. The only company that did the decals for the scheme I'm building, were Airfix. They have included decals for one of the VF-41 line birds from the JFK's 1997 Med cruise as well as CO's bird of VF-14 Tophatters with really nice tailart. The latter however has two serious problems - one side of the decal sheet is pretty badly off register and Airfix managed to screw the pooch with Modex numbers - the real bird carried 214 while Airfix printed the 201.

Anyhow back to VF-41 option. While the decals are surprisingly thin and the tail art decals fit perfectly, almost all other decals are like 15% too big. The "NO STEP" decals, compared to the Microscale sheet I used in the end, looked like 1:48 compared to 1:72. So yeah, in the end, some scheme specific decals were used from Airfix, others were mostly Microscale and some from a Fujimi kit (which had quite bad adhesion).

Anyhow all the troubles behind, here she is, ready for the next level of weathering.

Hi everyone! After a longer absence, I am back.
Was pretty busy at work with some joint NATO exercises going on and we had to provide ATC services for extended periods of time and the little time that was left, I spent it with my family.

Then this came along - another TOMCAT!

But fear not, I managed to sneak some time and add some details and put her on her own legs and here she is... some details still waiting to be attached, then flat coat, and again detailing, some weathering and on towards the finishing line.

Welcome back - great stuff! (now I hope iModeler crew get the issue with picture size sortes as yours are clearly cropped after you uploaded yhem in your latest post - they are working on it)

The paint work you have done on this is fantastic, especially in 1/72d. The patchwork paint replicates what I have seen on actual F-14s. Great job!