Eduard Danger Zone – F-14A Tomcat 1:48

[Mike]

Danger Zone – F-14A Tomcat
1:48 Eduard

The Tomcat was a much-loved and capable aircraft that had a unique look, and was brought fully into the mainstream media by the film "Top Gun" in the 1980s. It has its origins in the late 50s and a need in the 60s for a replacement to the (also much loved) Phantoms with something more agile and adaptable. After much faffing about (does all defence procurement do this?), a Grumman proposal was picked for development and to avoid any further flip-flopping by the then US Defence Secretary, building of a prototype was ditched in favour of development airframes. Only four years after first flight, the F-14A Tomcat went on its first deployment in 1974, serving with the US Navy until it was retired in 2006, accompanied by much gnashing of teeth and name-calling of its replacement, the F-18, which took some time to abate.

The F-14A was the first model, and because of a change of heart by the powers that be, which resulted in the Marines leaving the list of potential operators, it did not have the air-to-ground capabilities it was originally scheduled to possess. Instead it with a pure interceptor/fleet protection aircraft, armed with AIM-54 Phoenix for Beyond Visual Range (BVR) engagements for up to 100 miles in perfect conditions. It was also capable of carrying AIM-7 Sparrow and AIM-9 Sidewinder for self-defence and closer intercepts. Later in service, the ground attack capability was added to upgraded A variants, Bs and of course the later D that was dubbed the "Super Tomcat" because of its vastly improved capabilities.

This boxing is of course a tacit tie-in with the Top Gun era Tomcats with their flamboyant hi-viz schemes and swagger, but I'll try and keep any quotes from the movie to myself, although I'm sure some of you are by now singing Danger Zone… hopefully in your heads if you're with others as you read this.

The Kit
This is a re-boxing of the excellent Hobby Boss F-14A kit, and includes some resin and Photo-Etch (PE) extras to detail your model in the exhaust, cockpit and wheel areas. The kit arrives in a large box with black and yellow stripes and a painting of a Tomcat at speed on the front. Inside are a raft of sprues that are bagged individually or in pairs, plus a box of resin parts, all carefully protected within by foam sheets. There are twenty three sprues of various sizes within the box, plus upper and lower fuselage halves, and the two engine nacelles that don't appear on the sprue diagrams. All this is in a mid-grey styrene, and is accompanied by a long clear sprue that has a slight warping of the runners that thankfully doesn't affect the parts it holds. Twenty seven resin parts are inside the Brassin box, plus two frets of PE, one of which is pre-painted, the other in bare brass, and finally a set of masks in Eduard's usual yellow kabuki tape. The resin is bagged by subject, covering exhausts, ejection seats and wheels, and of course there's the instruction booklet in glossy full colour, with an equally colourful set of decals covering a large sheet and another smaller one.

Construction begins with the forward fuselage, starting with the cockpit, the tub for which is thoroughly overhauled by the addition of pre-painted PE side consoles and instrument panels. With the addition of the coamings and sidewall inserts, it becomes a full tub that is sandwiched between the forward fuselage halves a little later, after construction of the other components. The radar is attached to the forward bulkhead, and is adorned with a PE skin and two rows of little T-shaped antennae before it is attached via the kit mount. The nose gear bay is the penultimate assembly to be inserted within the fuselage, and this is made up from an L-shaped roof and rear bulkhead, to which the sides and front wall are added to maximise detail. You have a choice of portraying the catapult bar up or down by substituting the gear leg, and to this is added a small captive door, oleo scissor-link and of course the wheels. The kit wheels and their rubber tyres are discarded and replaced by the superbly detailed resin parts, which simply require liberation from their casting blocks in order to be used. Once the refuelling probe bay and probe are built into the starboard fuselage half, the cockpit, nose gear bay and radar bulkhead can be enclosed within the fuselage halves, after which the modeller can choose to open or close the small rectangular crew steps on the port side of the fuselage. The lower part of the forward fuselage is provided as a separate insert in order to mould the recesses for the AIM-7 Sparrow missiles carried semi-recessed on the belly hard-points. The 20mm Vulcan 6-barreled cannon is placed within the long series of bays on the port underside of the nose, and can either be locked away behind the access panels or displayed by leaving them off and painting the multi-part assembly according to instructions and your references. If you close it up, it may be of some use as a repository for nose weight, which isn't mentioned during construction. There are however numerous other places to stash any weight though, just so long as you remember to put some in there. The ejection seats are added later, and the new resin parts replace the kit offering, which simply can't compare with the detail that the resin and PE Brassin parts can provide. The belts are all pre-painted too, which saves us the job.

Attention moves to the wings next, building up the two part main parts and their flap track insert, after which the large leading-edge slats can be added in either the deployed position, or closed by nipping off the location points and laying the slat in its bay, flush with the wing. Test fitting will be important here before you commit to glue. The full-width flaps can be fitted at any angle, depending on whether you want to be able to move the wings, or pose them swept back, or over-swept for storage below decks. Because this is the early A variant, the forward retractable glove-vanes were still installed, so you must cut out the slots for them in the upper and lower fuselage halves, but don't fret as they are half-thickness, so easy to do. A number of holes and slots will also need to be drilled/cut out to accommodate the various antennae and such later, with two on the belly only needed if you want to install the TARPS pod that was often carried. The underside also needs its engine nacelles and forward intake trunking adding, along with the variable inlet ramps, which can only be placed in one position using the supplied actuation jacks. The nacelle lips have sharp tapering leading edges, which could easily be damaged, and come wrapped in a layer of foam protection to keep them safe from harm. These mate with the fuselage on lugs, and should make a neat join with the aft section, which has a lip to assist in alignment. Each nacelle has a strake running along its rear portion, and the split lower airbrake is added in either the open or closed position.

Before the aft fuselage can be closed up, the main gear bays and aft intake trunking must be built up, discarding the kit engine parts in the process. The wheel bays are built up from a stepped roof and separate walls that add extra detail over what can be achieved by a single piece moulding, and as long as you are careful with construction don't deserve the "over-engineered" epithet that is sometimes bandied about. We are modellers, are we not? The main struts have main retraction jacks and oleo scissor-links added before the new resin wheels are added, which have separate hub detail parts. You can add a degree of weighting by sanding a fraction off the contact patch when you are done. The bays are inserted from within the lower fuselage into a close-fitting recess to ensure a neat fit, and then the two-piece aft intake trunking is glued, the seams removed (if you think they'll be seen), and the two-part new resin engine faces are added at the rear. The fuselage can then be closed up, remembering to put the wings and their glove-vanes in at this point, or you'll look a bit silly when you realise your mistake! The twin-tails and tailerons are constructed from two halves each and added to their recesses on the aft of the fuselage, and the replacement exhaust trunking is built up from some exquisitely detailed resin and PE parts that slide within the aft housing and should be canted toward each other from the vertical by following the scrap diagram, before adding the exhaust petals to the ends of the trunks. The petals are moulded in the relaxed position, which will result in more of the interior being seen, but if you want to model them contracted you'll need to either use the kit parts, or source resin alternatives from elsewhere.

The forward fuselage is mated with the aft by a large contact surface that should ensure a good join, and only short seams on the upper and lower spine will need to be looked at to establish whether remedial work is needed. Cautious application of glue and test-fitting should minimise this. The large canopy is made up from two crystal clear parts, with the windscreen glued in place, while the rear can be posed open or closed by adding a short jack, part E50. The inner sill of the canopy is decorated with PE parts to simulate the L-shaped locking lugs, while the horseshoe shaped forward and central sill are both detailed with PE and additional rear-view mirrors. It might be wise to secure these parts by clear gloss such as Klear/Future to avoid marring the expanses of clear styrene, as any marks will show on the goldfish bowl that is the Tomcat's canopy. More PE edging is added to the windscreen along with a grab-handle, and sill inserts are added to the long fuselage sills with slots corresponding to the closure latches on the canopy. A full set of masks for the canopy and windscreen are supplied, along with masks for the main wheels. The crew access ladder folds out of the side of the fuselage, and can be moulded deployed or stowed at your whim by exchanging one set of parts for another. To complete the airframe, the individual gear bay doors are added around the bays, and the four-part arrestor hook and its housing are added to the rear.

Weapons
The Tomcat's weapons were stored under the lifting body fuselage, most of them being in the recess between the two engine nacelles, but with one under each nacelle, and another two on the wing glove "shoulders". The belly weapons are placed on semi-conformal pylons that fix to the fuselage by pins that locate in the holes drilled in the lower fuselage earlier. The shoulder pylons are more complex affairs, and have a basic pylon that is angled outboard to clear the landing gear, to which a side-rail for a Sidewinder is added, and a further vertical adapter rail for either a Sparrow or a Phoenix missile. Included in the box are the following:

2 x Fuel tanks
2 x AIM-9 Sidewinder
6 x AIM-7 Sparrow
6 x AIM-54 Phoenix
1 x TARPS Recce Pod

A diagram shows where the various weapons could be placed, but check your references for further details, as practical mission requirements often result in asymmetric loads.

Markings
As you'd expect from an Eduard Limited Edition, there are five colourful options to choose from for your model, all of which have been created by Furball Aero-Design for them, and printed by Cartograf to a very high standard. You can build one of the following from the box, all of which have the same grey base colour apart from the last one, which has a white underside:

• 162702 VF-84 Jolly Rogers, USS Theodore Roosevelt, 1989 – black tails, strakes and cockpit surround, with skull and crossbones on the tails, and a black stripe with gold arrows through the fuselage stars-and-bars. Radome is tan.
• 161271 (TARPS) VF-111 Sundowners, USS Carl Vinson, 1982 – Red/White sun motif on tail outers, red strakes and shark mouth on the nose.
• 161147 (TARPS) VF-31 Tomcatters, USS John F Kennedy, 1984 – Red tails & strakes with Felix the Cat carrying a bomb on the tails. On the inner tails are AC in black text. Radome is black.
• 161144 (TARPS) VF-124 Gunfighters, NAS Miramar, 1983 – NJ on the tails, radome is tan.
• 159634 VF-211 Fighting Checkmates, USS Constellation, 1976 – Black NG on the tails, Red/White checkerboard on rudders, red strakes, dark blue cockpit surrounds. White undersides.
  

A separate page details the many stencils on the airframe, as well as for the Martin Baker GRU-7 ejections seats.

Conclusion
A very attractive package that is bound to appeal and sell-out very quickly. If you want to take the detail even further, there is a BigSin Weapons set, Fabric seatbelts, Remove before Flight tags, and another PE set that details other parts of the airframe, all of which can be seen here.

Extremely highly recommended.

Review sample courtesy of

[Basosz]

One of my fave aircraft. Kit is rather expensive (5 cents shy of a hundred euros), but it looks extremely tasty.

[Mike]

It's certainly full of goodies, and you can go even more crazy if you add the extras I've just photographed for review

[Basosz]

Yeah I saw those on the same website where I found the kit... I need a better paying job !

[Mike]

BTW - this review has larger pics than usual. Only a bit, being 1280 rather than 1024 wide, but I'd be interested to hear what you think. Worth the fractional extra download wait?

[bootneck]

Those extra sized images look good Mike.

They should make my 1:144 reviews look like 1:32 kits!!

[Will Vale]

I like the big pictures.

I was really hoping that the decal sheet would include Lt. Pete "Maverick" Mitchell and LtJg Nick "Goose" Bradshaw though

[Mike]

Ok, big pictures it is then. I bet you there would have been copyright problems with using Goose & Maverick's names, particularly as there's another Top Gun (creatively titled "Top Gun 2") film in the works that the midget fruitloop is currently attached to. Wonder if it'll be a squadron of F-35s, or will it be F-18s? I can't see the Hornets being "sexy" enough for the screen, as with the best will in the world, they're not the prettiest aircraft in the air. "Functional" is probably the politest way of describing 'em from my POV

I've just realised that I never knew Goose's real name Will... that marks you out as a slightly sadder man than me. Finally! I found one!

[Will Vale]

Much as I'd like to claim the crown, I had to look it up. I'm not sure it's even mentioned in the film?

[Mike]

Maybe when they're mourning his loss? It's a long time since I've watched the film, and I tend not to pay too much attention to the bits without Tomcats in anyway

[Julien]

Mike those bits are what the fast forward control is for!

[Will Vale]

Maybe when they're mourning his loss?

Ah, I wondered whether it might be in the hearing scene? I don't mind having an excuse to watch Top Gun again, I even like the non-Tomcat bits.

My great achievement this year was seeing a Tomcat up close on board the USS Hornet. So cool

Will

[arnobiz]

I like the big pictures too, good idea. Your background is nice too, helps to appreciate how sharp the pictures are (compared to a sheet of coloured paper).

Arnaud

[Mike]

I like the big pictures too, good idea. Your background is nice too, helps to appreciate how sharp the pictures are (compared to a sheet of coloured paper).

Arnaud

Thanks - it's a bit quick to show the dirt & dust, but a lint-roller is my weapon of choice at combatting that

[Antoine]

I do not thank you, Mike, as I did have no plan to get this box, the reason being already too much tomcats in the stash (official number is classified).

But right now, I'm wondering....

[Mike]

Don't wonder too long Antoine, as I think this boxing will fly off the shelves pretty quickly

P. S. The pun was an accident

[Antoine]

The reflection took three minutes at best (Time to click on "confirm your order" included).....

Now I need an english lesson, as I've tried hard, but did not see the pun...

[Julien]

The pun was "fly" off the shelf.

[TheZapper]

Wonder if it'll be a squadron of F-35s, or will it be F-18s?

I was told it features F-22's and drones. We'll see...