I built this exact kit about three years ago when I was just starting out with an airbrush. I completed it but it didn't go particularly well and it didn't survive the house move. I've had it in the back of my mind for a while that I needed a second attempt because when it comes to aircraft the F14 is a good benchmark. You're only as good as your F14 attempt.
I was going to attempt this one last year having bought the same kit but then decided to sell it on Ebay as the decals didn't provide for a flat grey scheme and an extra set of decals would have pushed up the price to the point where I may as well have bought an expensive F14 kit.
If forgot about that logic though, so last month when I saw this one on sale for £20 I bought yet another one. Only when it arrived did I remember I needed an extra decal set, so this ended up costing far more than I wanted. If I'd researched it I could have gone with the HobbyBosss which is a far superior kit. (At twice the price it ought to be).
From memory I had this down as quite a good kit but with three years of intensive experience under my belt I've revised my opinion. It's not a good kit at all. The cockpit section join goes along the side of the fuselage and to make it fit you have to fill and sand it, taking some crucial detail off in the process. The gun port is barely defined, the Phoenix missile rails don't fit, the interior is far too basic, the exhaust ports are lacking, and the main body part is brittle and prone to cracking. The wing is all one piece with no folding flaps or slats. It really isn't sophisticated.
Having researched the market in F14s in 1:48 I can say with confidence that this is by far the worst offering which is why you can bag it for £20.
That said, you can pay up to £80 for a decent Tomcat. The Tamiya one seems to be the one to get for a good balance of quality and detail, though the Avantgarde Model Kits F14D has an amazing level of detail and is substantially cheaper. I'm tempted but for my purposes there's too much detail.
The compromise between the two seems to be the HobbyBoss which also looks like a very fine kit - and costs the same as the Italeri after you've bought extra decals. I've never had a bad HobbyBoss kit. The A6 Intruder I built had some panel fitting issues and a few inaccuracies, but nothing could be worse than this Italeri.
But wait up a minute! Just because it's a bad kit doesn't mean you can't get a good result. I set out to do a ghost grey Tomcat to the best of my ability and it's come out fine. I really like it and there's no reason why a competent modeller shouldn't be able to knock it into shape. The result has its shortcomings but nothing the casual observer would notice.
For this one I again attempted pre-shading which didn't really work so most of the panel line accentuation is either airbrush post-shading or oil paint weathering. I used some mottle stencils for some of the surface effect but it didn't really work for me. The pattern looks a bit obvious and I've seen it appearing on a lot of models lately. Oil paint weathering will do most of the job,
For the decals I used the Furball Aerodesign PtX set. They're decent enough (expensive) though I suspect they're not the most accurate, and the placement diagrams are useless. I had to improvise, and it didn't help that the Italeri instructions aren't that good either. Finding usable reference photos is harder than you might think, so much of the decaling was guesswork.
For all that, I think the HobbyBoss Tomcat is going on my shopping list just because I want to see what a good one looks like. At any price the Tomcat is worth the money because there's a lot of aeroplane there. It's not nicknamed "the big fighter" for nothing. Most of all I need to have a bash at one that doesn't join down the side of the fuselage so I can go to town on the panels. On a Tomcat it matters.
I would say the Italeri is a great beginner's kit, and the scheme supplied with the kit looks very fetching, and at £20 it's a good practice piece. That mine has ended up being one of my best ever builds is just icing on the cake. Since my modelling budget is tight these days, and after some high intensity projects, it's a real pleasure to get so much from something so basic. By that measure, I can't really call it a bad kit.
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