Anders_Isaksson

As understand it also the wing ammo panels are completely different so some more work would be needed, besides changing the gun barrels.

Amazing work, really well done!

The wing panels on the IIb and IIc are completely different.
 

I emailed Res/Kit yesterday and got a reply that the F-4 (E/J/F/G/S) exhaust set will be available in the next couple of days. Great!

No worries!
Thanks for the info so far. I will look into getting the Flightpath nose and go from there.

No problem
I am not sure yet myself.  Possibly I will modify the Tamiya kit radome to make deeper and make some cuts to the lower fuselage and bend the nose down in front of the nose gear bay
 
But I havent studied this as much at the moment on the best way to go sorry
 
Cheers Anthony

Many thanks Anthony and all for the input! 
I will look into this some more and consider modifying the front fuselage.

Hi Gary
I'm no Phantom expert, although I am on a steep learning curve with my British conversion.  I wondered as well why a new nose??  When you look into it the Tamiya radome is way too flat and the lower profile is all wrong leading up the the NLG door.
 
See how deep it is here...

 
Here is a comparison of the 2

 
Now, from what I understand so far, this only goes part the way to fixing the issue (please those that know better, correct me).
 
Tamiya Fuse is slightly short from the first station frame on the airframe front (and slight too vertical?) and the radome is too long, hence the overall length is pretty close.  However if you just fit the shorter resin nose you are only making the front even shorter.  My plan is to cut a couple of mm (I'll be more accurate at the time) off the kit nose as this will help sort the slight shortage in the front, which also makes the leading edge of the air conditioning ducts end up in the right place, rather than cut them back.
 
Then the resin nose can be fitted or you can choose to modify the Tamiya part which I might do as I will be deepening the radome anyway.
 
There is a lot of discussion on my build thread here, hopefully this link is to the right page
 
 
 
The discussion starts on Page 24, HTH
Cheers Anthony

Anders, See above my reply
Cheers

I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere that the Tamiya F-4C/D/J Phantoms should need a nosejob.

Has anyone used this set?
 
https://www.djparkins.com/product.php?productid=17694

I haven’t seen anything but it would make sense…

Sorry for asking here, but has Italeri so much as hinted at a future Gr.1 release?
I know about the IDS/ECR, but a proper GW1 RAF Tornado is what I would like...

have been following this with interest as the tomcat is getting close to the top of my build list. I built the revell one back in the 80's and it made into a nice kit but was basic compared to modern kits.  I would like to build the kit as a later aircraft as I'm not keen on the white/light grey colour schemes and think that either tamiya or trumpeter kits will enable me to do that. Price-wise the trumpeter one is slightly cheaper at full retail rates but I'll always look for deals. I enjoy building trumpeter kits, warts and all and have only ever built one tamiya 1/32 aircraft (Phantom) and didn't enjoy the experience due to fit issues and found the overall experience disappointing compared to the tamiya hype and elevated expectations.  That said the feedback I'd seen in other posts and in this tread was leading me to the tamiya kit. 
 
However the link to earlier treads above is really helpful as it pulls out in detail where the trumpeter kit is wrong and that's made my decision easy. For my style of building and for what I look for regarding accuracy levels I'm going to buy the trumpeter kit as it looks like it ticks all of my boxes and I wont need to spend any money on AM except maybe decals if I fancy a different scheme to that in the box. Nobody will see my version of this great aircraft once built and it will look like a tomcat to my eyes and that's all I need.
 
I stumbled across this tread at the right time - thanks to all how have posted in it, it's much appreciated.

Not sure how this relates to 1/32 Tomcats.

Agreed. One look at the AMK kit compared to Tamiya's rendition and the choice should be obvious.
Still, the AMK wings may be usable on the Tamiya kit if dirty wings are preferred. Not a cheap solution, but still...

My latest cockpit of the 1/24 Airfix F6F-5 Hellcat, modified quite a bit with Airscale Instrument Panels (& decals) and Adriatic Models resin parts.
 

 

 
 

 
 
Cheers,
Chuck

Agreed. One look at the AMK kit compared to Tamiya's rendition and the choice should be obvious.
Still, the AMK wings may be usable on the Tamiya kit if dirty wings are preferred. Not a cheap solution, but still...

Olivier, I tend to disagree. One does not need to build a kit to (rightfully, in this case) critisize its the shape issues. There are around 10000 pics of built Tamiyas an 8000 showing built AMKs to compare and that's pretty much enough to see that the Tamiya looks spot on and the AMK has several issues in more than one area.  I hope not to open a can of worms here...

Tamiya one worked out well enough for me. 
I’ll accept its inaccuracies, i chucked a few AM bits to jazz it up rather than correct anything.
I left the raised panel lines (laziness), gave it a snazzy paint job, and hey presto.....
It looks close enough to a Tomcat for my shelves. 

Having wrestled a bit with the old Tamiya Tomcat I'm having none of it anymore. Just not worth the work involved to make it shine, but that's of course a personal opinion.
 
The Trumpeter kit is (as said above) rather flawed when it comes to exterior shapes. The Zactoman intakes are (IMHO) essential add-ons. The wing having separate flaps and slats is a no-seller to me as Trumpeter's rendition is still rather inaccurate overall. Tried to accurize the HB 48th scale flaps/slats to make the wings passable but it was a lot of work, and I'm pretty sure the larger Trumpeter kit has every problem the HB kit has... so no thanks.
 
Revell... to me the forward fuselage around the cockpit with the windscreen and canopy all jumps out at me as being just more or less out of shape, with the shallow canopy being the main error for me. But others may think differently.
 
If only Tamiya would scale up their 48th scale Tomcat I guess we all would be rather happy...

I could sure do with the SF version... 

I could sure do with the SF version... 

I could sure do with the SF version... 

I could sure do with the SF version... 

I could sure do with the SF version...