While waiting for the weather to clear up so I can start the painting process for the VF-213 F-14D Tomcat I'm doing, I decided to start this one to kickstart my F-4 Phantom collection.

With aircraft kits, it always begins with the cockpit. Typical of Hasegawa, the control surfaces are all decals. Many people don't like this but for this scale, I think it's perfectly fine. Cockpit grey colors were handbrushed on and the decals quickly put on. The seats are quite detailed, made up of 5 parts. The only downside is the lack of any seatbelts. I made them by carefully cutting Tamiya masking tape and painting the resulting straps in grey. Placement was based on a picture of the actual Martin Baker Mark H-7 ejection seat I saw in The Ejection Site. I left out the waist belt since with the cockpit in the fuselage, that lack of detail can't be seen by anyone anyway. The ejection handles were carefully handpainted in alternate black and yellow colors. Not accurate by any means (the bands are too thick) but I they are really tiny.

In the process of placing the control panel details, I lost the left one. That's what I get for not working in a well lit room. Anyway, I decided to leave it as is, figuring that that again, with the cockpit, this missing detail won't be visible.

And I was right! Closing up the two fuselage halves, most of the missing detials can't be seen. Heh. And with my planned closed canopy configuration, they will be even more hidden.

The rest of the cockpit area was quickly painted up. Now I just need to attached the HUD and I can close up the cockpit. Never to see it again until I'm finished with the project.

So here I was looking around my in-progress stash, and what did I find? An old attempt at an F-14 in VF-213 Black Lions markings. The rest of the parts like landing gear are still in storage somewhere. However, near the VF-213 is my still in-progress F-14D VF-101 with all parts intact! The Vf-213 Tomcat is much closer to finishing so I figured I might as well 'steal' the necesary parts from the VF-101 and finish this one quickly. The following are what has been done up to this point.

I plan to use TwoBob's VF-213 'Lions over Afghanistan' markings. The decals showase VF-213 F-14Ds that operated during Operation: Enduring Freedom. As such, some things needed to be modified from the base kit, which out of the box, builds into an F-14B. The D variant differs from the B in the following ways:

• NACES ejection seats
• A HUD in the cockpit
• D-style chinpod

I plan to transfer all the D parts from the VF-101 project over to this one with the exception of the HUD which I will scratchbuild simply because the HUD on the VF-213 is already halfway modified towards looking like a D HUD.

The beginning of any aircraft kit build is the cockpit and the Hasegawa F-14 includes PE parts for the control surfaces. A simple matter of using superglue to attach to the cockpit tub for these. Straight black paint and drybrushing brings up the details of the surfaces. The MFD-looking thing was painted clear green. The contrast is slightly too much but with the canopy closed, it ought to be unnoticeable.

During OEF, Tomcats flew with their probe doors removed to prevent accidental tangling of the refueling hose from the tankers during air-to-air refueling. This means I must open the IFR (In-Flight Refueling) probe door and scratchbuild both the refueling probe and its housing.

Using the panel lines as a guide, I cut out the shape of the probe door. The housing was built-up using some sheet styrene while the probe itself is made of brass rod. It's not 100% accurate, but it's close enough to the real thing. Close enough for me anyway.

A quick test fit for the front half of the fuselage to the back and voila! I think it looks alright! As you can see, I made a mistake. I tried to cut too much of the IFR probe door. That part will be fixed easily during the putty stage.

I decided to arm my Tomcat for a late-war configuration. That is: 2 x AIM-9M, 1 x AIM-7M, 2 x Mk. 83 and 2 x GBU-16. Very heavily armed indeed. The weapons, along with the LANTIRN pod comes from the Hasegawa Weapons Set.