Hi from Germany, my name is István Illés, I´m a 30 year old mediadesigner, I´m building models for about 19-20 years now and mainly focus on Special Forces figures and modern US Aviation, mainly US Navy (late 70s - today).

The aircraft shown is the "60 years of Jolly Rogers" anniversary showbird of VF-103. The kit I used is the good old and somewhat pricy 1/48 Hasegawa F-14B kit, which has been around for years now and still has some minor fit problems one gets used to when building some of them. (3 built, 3 in my stash)
 

Being a Jolly Rogers fan (which started me building models), I had to build this bird and was very happy, when Steve Filak of www.aircraftresourcecenter.com and webmaster of www.scaleair.com came up with the idea of a Tomcat Group Build, so this was the perfect timing! :)

I had an Aires F-14A cockpit (which I modified according to pictures I got from friends), about 2-300 photos of the aircraft and scavenged BOL rails, the Lantirn Pod and the Bombracks from the limited edition Hasagawa FLIRcat kit. I used a good amount of putty, removing the excess resin on the excellent Aires pit was...let me put it this way: I wasn't too excited and it took quite a while. I worked about a week on the pit and it turned out ok. Again, I used several photos as reference, visited www.ejectionsite.com, a great reference source for bangseats, Squadron's F-14 walkaround book, although I bet, Daco´s F-14 book is by far superior like the superb F-18 book, but hasn't arrived yet, so I'll use it for the next build.

Decals came from Twobobs. the kit was preshaded, painted with Model Master colors, got a layer of future for the decals, was weathered with artists oils, thinned waterbased acrylics and pastell chalks.

The baseplate was completely scratchbuild from plasticard within 6 hours. I carved the squares into the surface and shaped the edges like on the real things, then I added a mixture of black acrylics and white glue to replicate the tar-ish material. Weathering was also done with oils and pastellchalks, some drybrushing and thinned acrylics.
Well, what else can I say? Hope you like it!

Photo by CAPT Dana "Smudge" Potts

Photos and text © 2005 by Istvan Illes

April 5, 2005

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