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F14A Tomcat - PART THREE

The landing gear constructed and plugged into the wheel wells with no issue. I added wiring and plumbing to the landing gear legs using fine wire. The rubber/vinyl tires provided by Hasegawa are both good and bad. With time, they squash on the model while it sits on your display shelves so that they create convincing looking weighted tires. Then, with more time, they start to decompose and leave oily spots on your display shelves. Finally, they start to crack and fall apart. I learned this from using the rubber/vinyl tires in the high-grade F-4 Phantom kits. Hence, I replaced the F-14 wheels and tires with resin items available from Cutting Edge.

I added the various antennae and little details at the end of the project, just before declaring myself done. Even these were not without some headaches.

The arresting hook is about a quarter of an inch too long. This causes it to hang out beyond the beaver tail. It should be even with the end of the beaver tail. I cut off the end of the hook, removed about a quarter of an inch from the end of the center rod portion, and re-attached the hook tip.

The COM antennae along the spine do not fit the locator holes on the fuselage. I filled the kit provided holes and redrilled some of my own. While I was at it, I scratch built new antennae from .020 inch sheet styrene (cut to size to match the kit pieces).

The nose tip pitot part does not really fit the hole on the tip of the nose cone. Also, it is too long. I took the same approach here as I did on the spine COM antennae and scratch built a new pitot with brass wire and the "pitot-less" nose tip in the kit. Then, I filled the hole on the nose tip and redrilled a new hole to match the thickness of the brass wire.