I was happy to see Hasegawa reissue these kits as I have several of the "Eggplanes" but not the F-14. The kit comes in a sturdy top opening box - great for holding the parts as you work on the model. There are twenty-eight Gray plastic parts and one crystal clear canopy for the F-14 Tomcat and a colorful decal sheet with two schemes. The canopy is loose in the box allowing it to be scratched up a bit, but a little polishing and a dip in Future took care of that problem. Considering this is a humorous kit I was surprised to see a four-piece instrument panel on the decal sheet. There is a plastic nose weight included but I did add a few grams of extra weight to the nose of the F-14 to be on the safe side.

Let's proceed with the build. As with the F-15 kit the upper fuselage is a bit wider than the bottom part and will required a little filler and Mr. Surfacer worked find here. There is a fairly large tapered gap on the inside of the nacelles to the fuselage join. I filled it in with a piece of Evergreen .010" sheet sanded to a taper near the aft end of the engine nacelle. I use the Tamiya extra thin glue that causes the plastic to melt and will fill small seams/gaps in the plastic parts. A little bit of sanding here and there and we're ready for the paint shop. I used the recommended colors call outs. FS numbers are included on the plans allowing me to use my preferred Testors Model Master paints. I did make FOD covers out of Evergreen sheet stock as the engine faces are too far back and there is no intake lining. I painted the FODs red.

The decals are next after a couple of coats of Future. I started with the vertical tails. As shown in the pictures they proceeded to roll up on me. I had to think about this problem a bit as the decals in the F-15 Eggplane kit gave me no trouble at all. I had trimmed the Black Unit decal as I had done in the past with no ill effect. I took one of the second scheme decals and placed it on another model as a test and realized the trimming was the problem. DON'T TRIM THESE DECALS. The red turbine stripe is a little long and when I cut off the excess it also wanted to curl up. After learning that all the remainder of the decals laid down fine without any trimming. After the decals had dried I wiped off the excess decal glue and applied a couple of flat clear coats. As the Instrument decals would need trimming I left them on their backing and used Elmer's white glue to place them in the cockpit.

All in all another fun build. Again I'm thinking about which one of my other 'Eggplanes' do I want to build. Let's see F-86, SR-71, Fw-190 etc so many choices so little time. All of the above products are available at most of your local Hobby shops and online.