Well, with the F-14 Tomcat flying off into the sunset, I thought I would share some photos of my Tomcat collection, including my two submissions for the Tomcat sunset Model Display held this past weekend at NAS Oceana, VA.
Anyways, to start off, I currently have three Tomcats in my collection, an F-14A from VF-84 "The Jolly Rogers", an F-14B from VF-11 "The Red Rippers" and an F-14D Tomcat from VF-213 "Black Lions".

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All three of the kits are the venerable Revell F-14A/D Tomcat kits.  All of the kits have had the panel lines scribed and the VF-84 jet has had boarding steps scratchbuilt as well as the addition of the kit boarding ladder.  Both the VF-11 and VF-84 jets have toothbrush handle bits that were used for the red and green marker lights on the wingtips, tails and the glove positions. The VF-213 jet had the refuelling probe bay opened up and a scratchbuilt IFR probe added.

All three aircraft have the True Details resin cockpit sets added to them.
The F-14D needed to have some PE CRT screens added to make it look more like
the F-14D cockpit.  Scribing these kits and adding the toothbrush handle lighting took the most amount of time on the kits...but well worth the effort in the end.

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Finally, to wrap up, I submitted two models to the "Tomcat Sunset" that was recently held at NAS Oceana.  My VF-14 F-14A was a difficult project to paint as I had no good top views of the jet.  When it returned from Operation Desert Storm, the front half was painted in a very bluish-grey while the back half was painted light gull grey with spots of the low viz grey used for spot priming.  Model was inspired by photos taken by David F.
Brown (aka Mr Tomcat) on the aircrafts return to Oceana.  The second jet was a VF-211 F-14A that was part of my collection, but donated to the Sunset as we had come up short and no one had built a VF-211 Tomcat.  Both models made it in one piece thankfully.

Anyways......even though the Tomcat will no longer be the sharp end of the spear, it will continue to live on in the movies "Top Gun" and "The Final Countdown", memories, and model shelves alike.  ANYTIME BABY!!!!! 

Colin

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