¹⁄35

F14A Tomcat - PART THREE

To tell if a kit is a reworked one, check the engine intake pieces. If there is a deep half-inch notch cut out of the inside corners of these pieces, the kit is a reworked one.

Like most kits, the construction starts in the cockpit. The basic kit cockpit is "generic" so that it is reusable between all the various kit releases. The main cockpit tub has no detailing. Into the tub are installed all the specific detail pieces to provide the correct details for the specific Tomcat version being built. I found that some of the detail pieces did not fit as well as they could.

The front cockpit side consoles are a sixteenth of an inch too small for the space on the cockpit tub that they fit into. The intention is that they are attached flush to the rear wall, leaving a slot at their front ends. Then, the left and right instrument sub-panels are supposed to slip down into these slots. There are two issues here. The slots are not wide enough to fit the sub-panels, and the sub-panels have raised details all the way to their edges. Some of the details on the lower section of the sub-panels get covered up when the they are slipped into the slots in front of the side consoles. I thinned the sub-panels by sanding down the backing so they would fit into the slots in front of the side consoles and just accepted that some detailing was getting covered up as I slid them into place.