It’s time to close up the intakes by pre-painting the interior white.
The bottom of the intake lips are also painted at this point in Metal Color Jet Exhaust.
After that I joined the nose to the fuselage and thankfully the fit is pretty good! There’s a very very minor step on the join that’s easily sanded smooth. Note the disk of Aurora film on the HUD projector.
This particular F-14D will be built un-armed and happily, GWH molds the details of the mounting areas on the pylons. I believe that only GWH does this and other manufacturers should really follow their example: we don’t always want to heavily arm our kits.
I also added the chinpod and ventral fins. There is an option for the ventral fins to have their deck hooks deployed.
The top side is put together as much as I can get away with for painting.
The stores will be just the LANTIRN pod and the two external tanks.
At this point I test-fitted the canopy and am glad to report both parts fit well.
By the time of the F-14D, the extendable wing gloves have been deleted from the aircraft but the kit comes with them so I cemented them inti place and will fill up the gaps.
Pre-painting is done for the engine shrouds. I noted in photos that the lips were a different color and painted accordingly in Vallejo Metal Color Aluminium. The shrouds themselves are usually an off-blqck color so I painted these Tamiya XF-85 Rubber Black.
The front panel of the windshield is painted with a few thin layers of a mix of Tamiya Clear Blue and Green.
Usually at this point I would mask up the canopy but I decided to tackle the seamline when the windshield is attached to the nose. Normally I would run Vallejo Plastic Putty through the seamline but that tends to shrink and so a faint seamline still remains. This time I tried with epoxy putty which nicely cleans up with water. Hopefully it’s a better solution than Vallejo Plastic Putty.
I managed to get my hands on a set of canopy masks from Galaxy Models and these went on without a hitch and saved me a few hours of very careful masking on the windshield.
With that done I attached the main canopy into place, painted the canopy frame in Tamiya XF-85 Rubber Black and went ahead with pre-shading the kit with the same color.
Build Log
Pt.1 – Construction | Pt.2 – Construction | Pt.3 – Construction
Pt.4 – Painting | Pt.5 – Painting & Finishing
