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F14A Tomcat - PART THREE

With the intakes completed and fully attached, I attached the forward fuselage to the rear fuselage. The joint between the forward and rear fuselage did not align well. The cross-section shapes of the two fuselage sections are not the same. I used a heavy styrene strip to widen the upper portion of the rear fuselage opening. This helped the forward and rear fuselage shapes to match each other better.

By this time, I was getting used to applying liberal amounts of filler to this kit. I applied some more filler and sanded it out to smooth the fuselage joint. I also needed to reinforce the inner structure of the fuselage joint. I had placed a lot of lead shot in the nose area of the model to guarantee the it would sit correctly on its landing gear. This made me fear that the nose section would get broken off if I was not careful. The reinforcing gave me some peace of mind.

At this point I was holding a nearly completed fuselage that was starting to really look like a Tomcat. I thought the big issues were finally past, but I had one more to go -- the wings. The wing problems relate mostly to the wing flaps and the pieces that go into the wing flap construction to support the lowered wing flaps.

To build the model with the flaps retracted (up), things fit pretty much as advertised. All that is needed is to thin the trailing edge of the upper wing piece, and the flap slides in with very little extra effort. Not readily apparent in the instructions is that the "eyelid" doors (kit parts C1 and C8) are discarded when the flaps are up.