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With my recent trip to NAS Oceana
and VF-103 still fresh on my mind, I decided to finish a tomcat in thier current
lo vis scheme. Being a huge fan of work horse birds, I decided to model Victory
104 as she appeared in March 2002. VF-103's tomcat's are the dirtiest I have
ever seen, with severe fuel streaks on the top of the aircraft, along with oil
and hydraulic fluid streaks along the daily doors of the underside of the plane.
To simulate this, I used a wash of raw umber and an ink roller ball pen. I just
ran the pen through the panel line, and took wet tissue and wiped it toward the
back of the airplane. It gives a pretty
cool effect.
About the only thing I did to the
cockpit, was add Verlinden's GRU-7A seats, and I scratch built the knee panels
to the front instrument panel.
VF-103's birds are painted in a 3
tone TPS, Medium gray, Dk Ghost gray, and Lt Ghost gray, with the LT Ghost gray
curving under the nose, just forward of the TCS chin pod. This a pretty
distinctive feature on the Jolly Rogers birds. I kept spot priming to a
minimal
this time, and tried a reversed shading effect by lightly spraying Dk Ghost gray
in the centers of the panels on the top side of the aircraft to simulate fading.
The markings I used were from Yellow Hammer, with the modex numbers being from
Hasegawa, and the stenciling from Aeromaster.
I used Eagle
Designs PTIDS screen and BOL rail (on the port wing glove pylon). VF-103's
tomcats, at the time I saw them, had only one BOL rail on the port side, and the
"regular" rail on the starboard. Since F-14B (UPGRADES) have a GPS
antennae on the spine, I made one from an AIM-9B sidewinder seeker head.
Weapons came from Hasegawa weapons sets, with the LANTIRN pod and bomb racks
coming from various Hasegawa F-14 kits.
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All in all, it took around 120 hours
to build this Tomcat, even with all the filling and sanding, the end result was
definitely worth it.
Brian
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