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Tomcat launch dio 1/48 - DONE AFTER 4.5 YEARS!!!


ClumsyDude

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Hi all, been watching the forums for years now and marvelling at the amazing skills here. I have been meaning to start on a proper LSP WIP, but given that I've been working on my current project for over three years now - with no end in sight - I figure I might as well start posting photos of that.

I've always been a tragic Tomcat fan. So, when I first came across Masa Narita's tomcat launch dio (see www.naritafamily.com) I knew that I wanted to build it. Did a couple of other tough 1/48 kits first (Academy F-111C, Hasegawa F-4E) to boost my painting and scratch building skills before I tackled the dream project. I finally kicked it off around Feb 2012, by which time Skunkmodels had released their 1/48 carrier deck and JBD. I also collected a Hasegawa F-14, a bunch of paint masks, a Skunkmodels tractor, and some figures.

Of course the Skunkmodels deck kit is way off scale - the base is too small for a Tomcat, for starters, and the distances between the JBD and catapult are out of whack. Also, the surface texture is terrible and the spacing for the pad eyes is pretty random. So I figured I'd start with a big acrylic sheet from Bunnings and take it from there.

First was the planning stage: I slapped together an Italeri Tomcat which I was planning new to use as a paint mule and scale estimator (wasteful, maybe, but it was only $20 and I figured for a four or five year project I could tolerate that). I also used blu-tack to put together some figures and printed off a catapult from a CAD drawing I found on line. Results are here:

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More to follow!

Edited by ClumsyDude
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Next step was preparing the base. I got myself a piece of MDF cut to the right size, and likewise a piece of black acrylic sheet from Bunnings. I even bought some framing dowel and a right-angle clamp to put the frame together - not pretty, necessarily, but adequate. Once it's properly done I may get a professional to make a frame for me (or better yet a display cover to keep the dust off).

 

I then laid some styrene foam inside the frame as a base for the acrylic (the JBD required a gap in the foam):

 

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Acrylic was then grafted to the Skunkmodels JBD. Pretty messy and not as flat as I'd have liked, but got the job done:

 

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And with the Italeri tomcat posed on top:

 

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Comments, criticisms etc all welcome!

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Next up was the cockpit. I decided against a resin cockpit, as the canopy would be closed, and I figured it would probably be distorted anyway through the canopy. Then, for reasons I didn't fully understand, I figured I'd try to replicate something like a resin cockpit by scratch building stuff. I started with the seats.

 

Cushions out of the box had some detail but didn't really look the part:

 

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So I fashioned a sort of sideways scriber out of an old blade and some scrap plastic. This would allow me to carve a line at the side of the seat, to replicate the look of the seat cover, and maintain a constant distance from the front of the cushion:

 

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And here it is against the side of the cushion:

 

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One cushion, now with padded cover, and foil and tamiya tape for a bit of extra detail:

 

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And with a bit of paint slopped on:

 

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Seat frames together with a bit of scratch, and the face curtain handles thinned a bit more to scale (they would subsequently snap, of course, and need to be replaced by wire):

 

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And with a bit more paint - you can sort of see where I've tried for tire black on the headrest to contrast with the metallic black on the frame:

 

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I didn't then get any WIP pics until after the cockpit was complete, including washing, dry brushing and teeny tiny decals ... For which I'm now kicking myself! A LOT more hours went into the seats from this point forward, but you'll have to wait until they're in the cockpit and installed!

 

Cheers

Jim

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Ok, so next up was the cockpit. The aim was to try to replicate a more detailed cockpit (using photos of the aires resin set as a guide), using my dodgy scratch building skills.

 

First up was the main instrument panel. It's certainly detailed enough out of the box for a dio where the canopy will be closed. I put white primer underneath Tamiya black, and then scraped off the dial faces with a toothpick. Here's the first cut:

 

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And here it is with some future on the dials, and clear green drying on the CRTs:

 

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Same technique was used on the main pit:

 

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Then I added a bit of colour, a wash and some dry brushing etc.

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And here you can see my scratch efforts at plumbing on the rear wall:

 

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Side walls to come!

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Of course, you can't really see the cockpit side walls on an F-14 with the canopy closed. Suspect that's why Hasegawa didn't pay a lot of attention to them. But I figured I'd give it a shot.

 

First attempt (with epoxy putty and some Evergreen scratch work) just didn't look right. So I scraped it off and tried again. The technique was, mix up some epoxy putty, then try for a fabric look by stretching some cling wrap over the top, and pushing the cockpit against it to make sure it lined up with the edges of the cockpit. Results are here:

 

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Here's the next step with a bit of styrene and lead wire scratch:

 

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And here with a bit of paint and a wash:

 

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Next up I spent a bunch of time on subassemblies. Won't spend a lot of time going over what I did except for a few items.

 

Intakes were of course a nightmare. Finally got them smooth on the inside - don't want to think how long it took - more applications of putty, primer and sandpaper than I care to think about!

 

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Then there was the tiny intake on top of the port vertical tail. All Hasegawa gives you is a notch - pretty ugly and in need of modification. My descriptive skills are lousy and photos are out of focus, but let's see how we go.

W

First, I cut out a chunk of the fairing forward of the notch. This allowed me to get a drill in there at a downward angle. Having drilled a hole at the right size, I inserted some evergreen rod the same size as the hole - but with the top half filed down a little to leave a crescent shaped gap. Sorry about the lousy photos:

 

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Then sanded back the rod to agree with the rest of the fairing, applied putty and off we go. Unfortunately didn't get pics in progress, but here's a look at the finished article:

 

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Then I did some work on the navigation lights. The kit lights were, in a word, hopeless - didn't fit at all. So I superglued some shiny bare metal foil into the gap, then glued some clear sprue on top and sanded to shape.

 

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The only other thing I tried to do at this stage was get some texture on the wing sweep bags, so they'd look a bit like leather. I sanded down the styrene bags, and glued thick lead foil over the top. I then scored the foil with coarse sandpaper to try to create a grain. See below:

 

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Unfortunately it looked a bit terrible so I sanded it back to more or less flat.

 

More to come next time!

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Thanks Chris, appreciate it. Agree with you on the launch dio - when I first got back into the hobby (about seven years ago), I found Masa Narita's 1/32 diorama and said to myself, "I have got to do one of those." I put off having a go for a further four years, while I got my skills up to the level that I felt I needed to do it justice ... I suspect that anyone who was a teenager when Top Gun came out has a similar fixation!

 

Cheers

Jim

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Ok, so the next step was getting the forward fuse together and installing the cockpit. The left side of the Hasegawa forward fuselage has a cheesy representation of the gun, probably so that they can render different gun gas vents for different models of Tomcat. These fit very poorly, and plenty of filling and sanding is required in order to get them looking ok. I also thinned down the gun muzzle quite a bit as it looks really chunky out of the box.

 

Next up, I glued the forward fuse together and attached it to the rear. Plenty of styrene and CA reinforcement!

 

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I added some lead foil to the canopy coamings to try to simulate a fabric effect (out of the box, Hasegawa gives you a dodgy crosshatch pattern which looks terrible to my eye). According to the Aires set, the forward coaming has a sort of extra patch on top which I tried to duplicate. Hard to see in these photos but will be clearer in later ones.

 

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Then it was on to filling up the cockpit. It's a launch dio, so I wanted the pilot figures looking as realistic as I could get them. This was an issue as I've never done much with figures before. Much research into techniques was needed before I got going!

 

I used the figures from the Hasegawa deck crew set. They fit together well, and I used a technique I saw on this site, running the edge of a no.11 blade around the edge of the clothing detail to sharpen it. After primer, I sprayed base colours for clothing, and then (with the airbrush pointing up at the figure from below) sprayed a darkened mix for shadow. After, with the airbrush pointing down at the figure from above, I sprayed a lighter mix of the base colour. It's a subtle effect in real life, and almost lost in the photos:

 

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After that I added washes and decals. The stars on the helmet are custom decals from Ad Astra masks (from whom I got the masks that I used for the rest of the plane); the stripes are sliced off a spare decal sheet.

 

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And some silver to detail the buckles

 

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Also at this point I noticed I'd broken off the face curtain handles on the ejection seats. Much swearing ensued; after it subsided I made a jig and duplicated them with copper wire.

 

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Next up - the cockpit all together!

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  • 2 weeks later...

Thanks Maru!

 

Next step was to install the pilots in the cockpit. This required some surgery to the pilot figures, whose legs are too long out of the box; for some reason, the pilots in the Hasegawa deck crew set - which has a launching Tomcat on the box - won't fit in the Hasegawa Tomcat.

 

Unless, of course, you chop their feet off. Which I (quite ruthlessly) did; I figure if they are flying in a Tomcat which I built, getting launched off a catapult which grew out of my shabby scratch building skills, they'll have to rely on the ejection seats that I put together. In other words, they're doomed anyway, so it makes no difference if they die with no feet.

 

Here are the shots with pilots, seats and coatings installed. You can see the end result of the filling and scribing on the left fuselage.

 

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If you look at the shots above and below you can see the green HUD lens. This was a bit of acrylic rod filed down to fit in the aperture, and then thickly coated with Tamiya clear green.

 

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Thanks for looking!

 

Cheers

Jim

Edited by ClumsyDude
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