Hi all,

It's my first time posting in Aeroscale althought I have been posting in Armorama for the past 2 or 3 years. I am more of an tankie or armor modeller or still tryinig to be one

I have not modelled any plane before but last week, I saw a very well done F-14 on display and I thought I try one as well.

Can anyone suggest for a 1/72 scale F-14 Tomcat, which kit should I try to get?

There are so many choice out there that I am really confused....

Thanks for the help in advance.

Hey there mike. You can try out Academy which is kinda affordable ya?

hi there Mike... long time no see/........

you could try hasegawa line...i built one of their 90s cats.. raised panel lines but fitting is good... affordable too...
u can also try fujimi's cat,....

not so sure about academy but heard it's good too

After building many of available kits of this wonderfull aircraft I would highly recommend (despite it costing a little more) the Hasegawa offering if you are after a relative easy build (and the newer ones have recessed panel lines) . Here's one of my Hasegawa kits I did for the Tomcat Campaign we had recently here.



I hope you will post some progress pics once you have decided which kit you'll build

Can't comment about the academy kit, t as a rule their decals are cr4p - to say the least, so unless you intend investing in AM decals you'll be disappointed in the finished model.

HTH

Andy

Hi Silantra, Good to hear from you again. I have been in hibernation for the past few months after my pather G.....

And all, thanks for your recommendation.
I guess I will go with Hasegawa since 3 of out 4 of the folks here recommended it.

I will go find a LHS here that carries this kit :-)

I'm currently building an old Matchbox Tomcat, purely for nostalgia (I built one as a kid and always wanted to see it painted but never got around to it - 35 years later...)

I haven't built any other Tomcats so I can't give a direct comparison, but I'd have to say the Matchbox is pretty poor. Moulding quality is very heavy and clumsy with not much detail on offer. Panel lines (trenches) are engraved, but they are deep, wide and I suspect don't bear much resemblance to the original. Having criticised the depth of the panel lines, they do give the oportunity to hit the kit hard with wet'n'dry to at least make the surfaces flat (after which the panel lines look much sharper).

The movable wings are pretty toy like, I opted to build mine with fixed wings and completely removed the geared swing wing assembly.

Parts fit is very poor, the upper/lower body and fuselage/body joins needed a lot of filing and filling, and generally all the part make only a token gesture of fitting together.

I haven't got to the decaling stage yet, but the decals have been sat in the box for 30+ years and Matchbox decals were always pretty dire (regularly used to fall apart as soon as they hit the water) so I'm not hopeful.

I gave up trying to turn this old beast into a top quality display model, instead I'm building it as a testament to how far the industry has moved forward, and a testament to my youth. Anyway, if it was covered in delicate PE I wouldn't be able to pick it up and fly it round the room with suitable sound effects... thereby proving that as an exercise in nostalgia it's great. For a quality model of the F14 - look elsewhere!!

Hasegawa my friend