My 1:72 F-14A and F-15J legacy Hasegawa kit builds

stevethefish

My name's actually not Steve
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Jun 12, 2015
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I'm still kinda getting my feet wet with jet aircraft builds, so I am practicing on these cheap kits. I'm glad I did, because I had some mishaps on these. I finished these two builds in May, during the whole stay-at-home nonsense.

I understand that people complain about the price of Hasegawa kits, but they are actually rather affordable here in Japan. This is a problem of distributors, I believe. Ever since Revell's parent company Hobbico went belly up, I can imagine that due to the lack of a solid distributor, Hasegawa kits must be expensive in North America. I dunno about Europe and Australia.

Despite these being older toolings with raised panel lines (I believe they're from the '70s), they fit together fairly well and I don't have any serious complaints. I wish I had paid attention to the seamlines on the wings of the F-15 more, though. I lost a part or two to the F-14, and I also realized that the kit does not provide enough decal stripes for the Phoenix missiles. Because of these issues, it warranted a purchase of a new kit to use for replacements. This F-14 kit only goes for about 1,100 yen or so (about $11US), and ordering the replacements from Hasegawa would cost about the same.

This is their "High Visibility" F-14 kit. It was a toss up between the Sundowners and Jolly Rogers. I went with the Jolly Rogers because I figure that if I ever build the 1:48 Tomcat by Tamiya, I'd like to do that as a Sundowners because it comes with the appropriate decals for the helmets. One thing I should point out with the instructions is that it doesn't mention the decals to put on the ejection seats until you get to the last page. I had to carefully remove the canopy to get back to it.



The F-15J seems to be an even older kit and not as sophisticated. There are no decals for the cockpit instrumentation. Those pointy things on top of the vertical stabilizers (I assume they are pitot tubes or some other kind of sensor) were a problem and eventually one broke off. Then after I had put the decals down and a clear coat, I masked off the areas around the wheel wells to paint their insides because I forgot to do this before decaling. Some of the decals lifted up from the masking. This kit only goes for about 700 yen, so I bought a new one. I clipped off one of the pointy thingies and affixed it to the aileron, reinforcing it with some wire. So this is the JASDF version of the F-15. It might be very slightly different (I think the part that broke off may be a different size than the American F-15). There are several different decal options for this kit. I went with the standard Eagle squadron as on the box.

Because these kits have raised panel lines, I did preshading on the panel lines and built up the main colors. I used Mr. Color lacquers on these. I weathered the F-14 with Mig Ammo Starship Streaking and I used artist oils on the F-15. As I said, these do come together fairly well despite their age. While the F-14's cockpit has better detail and comes with decals for the instrumentation, it lacks the "face curtain" pull rings on the ejection seats. I fashioned those myself with metal wire and painted them yellow and used a black Gundam Marker for the black stripes. The F-15 has those bars on the top of the ejection seat (I think it's to help punch through the glass in case the canopy doesn't jettison properly), so I used metal wire to replicate that. I also glued segments of wire to replicate hoses.

Hasegawa does have newer toolings of these kits. One thing to point out is that this older legacy F-14 has poseable wings for the variable geometry. It has the gears inside for sweeping the wings back and forth, as does the Revell kit. Hasegawa's newer tooling for the Tomcat has you choose which position to pose the wings in, forward or back.

I am nearly done with Hasegawa's legacy F-4EJ. As with the F-15, this kit's cockpit is rather sparse and the ejection seat only vaguely resembles the Martin Baker ejection seats. I've added pull rings from Hasegawa's newer F-4 kit for that. I'll start a message on that when it's done.

Aside from the above photo galleries, I have build videos for these kits on my YT channel, youtube.com/stevethefishdotnet. In those videos you can see what I did with the cockpit interiors.

So if anyone would like me to share some decals and spare parts for these kits, let me know because I have extras of both kits going to waste.
 
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Really nice work! And you say you are just getting your feet wet?
Well, I have built a few jet fighters in the past, but I'm not nearly as experienced as many others who have built so many of such kits. Here I am getting better at weathering techniques and such. Thanks for the compliments.
 

This is cool! The Tom Cat is an awesome bird if I decide to build another aircraft kit I want to build a Tomcat but I feel I can only build one if it's a high end super detailed kit so I do the old bird justice I just don't know if my skills are up to the task specifically in the weathering area.
 
This is cool! The Tom Cat is an awesome bird if I decide to build another aircraft kit I want to build a Tomcat but I feel I can only build one if it's a high end super detailed kit so I do the old bird justice I just don't know if my skills are up to the task specifically in the weathering area.
This Tomcat is Hasegawa's older model, but they have a newer version with better detail. As far as 72nd scale Tomcats go, I'd say that the Fine Molds kit probably has the best detail, complete with service panel doors that can be posed open, etc. I am currently building the Academy Tomcat (distributed here in Japan by Doyusha) and it has rather nice detail. As for Western kits, I would not have any experience with those. The Italeri Tomcat gets re-popped, but it has raised panel lines.
 

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