The amazing Tamiya Tomcat has yet another aftermarket item to dress it up: Early wheels fro Eduard.

The Eduard Brassin set for the F-14A Tomcat includes 8 resin parts and a sheet of paint masks.

The instructions are simple enough, as this is a fairly easy set to build (and illustrate). The 4 tires are molded onto pour plugs which make painting the wheels easy. The first step is to paint the nose gear and main hubs white. After a bit, one can mask off the nose gear hubs with the masks provided. The mask sheet gives you 8 masks for the wheels, but only the 4 for the nose gear are to be used. If you save them, you can reuse them on the kit gear and have masks for the main gear.

Once the masks are in place, then use your favorite tire color to paint the tires blacks.

After the paint is dry, I lightly weathered them with a wash to represent the typical grime found on wheel hubs in the fleet (even freshly painted aircraft have some wheel brake dust after the first flight) and sawed the main hubs off the pour blocks.

On the mains, as the landing gear mount point is a particular shape so make sure to install the hubs by aligning each side with the tab on the wheel. The nose gear are much less precise and can be mounted in any orientation. After examining my tires in the photos, I have decided I need to give the rubber another coat of paint as the primer did not stick to the resin very well. I used my usual wash of 409 and a soft toothbrush, but it was apparently not as effective as it was on the last Brassin set.

I would like to express my thanks to Eduard for allowing my the pleasure of building and reviewing this set.