Publisher: Valiant Wings Publishing
Author: Daniel Zamarbide Suarez
ISBN 9 780957 586604
Price: £11.95 RRP (Sep 2013)
Review by: Geoff Coughlin
You can get this superb title here now at www.valiant-wings.co.uk , ADH Publishing and good specialist book and hobby retailers worldwide. Our thanks to Mark at Valiant Wings Publishing for supplying our review sample…
Vital statistics
‘Building The North American P-51D Mustang’ contains:
- 64 pages in total – full colour throughout
- Detailed description of what you get in the box
- Preparation and overview
- 32+ pages on construction from start to finish including detailing and, painting and weathering
- Walk-around images of the real aircraft, including diagrams from the Flight Manual
- 5 pages of colour profiles by Richard J. Caruana
- In-depth bare metal ‘how-to’ guide
- Additional references and available decal sheets
- Details on additional accessories produced by Zoukei-Mura for their Mustang kit.
Background information to the series
This is the first title in the Airframe Constructor series: ‘Building the North American P-51D Mustang’. This in-depth build covers construction and finishing of the 1:32nd scale Zoukei-Mura kit in forensic detail, but in a manner which demystifies the whole process of building such a complex kit. Author of this first title in this exciting new series is Daniel Zamarbide.
The North American P-51D Mustang needs little introduction, being an iconic aircraft. Modellers are fairly spoiled for choice when it comes to model kits of the P-51D and with both Tamiya and Dragon offering kits in the same large scale Zoukei-Mura needed to come up with something special – and they did. You have builds of both the Tamiya and Dragon offerings in your Finished Now area of SMN and we hope to also bring you one for the ZM kit in due course. And so this new title will prove popular amongst all those interested in the type.
Title structure
You can see the overall structure above but each section brings another highlight from the stage-by-stage build, painting and weathering through to the walkaround reference section. Furthermore the colour profiles by Richard J. Caruana are excellent as usual and cover some interesting subjects, not least the overseas operators and non-US air forces; just check out Daniel’s Guatemalan AF machine on the book’s cover!
Presentation throughout is very high and the paper is that nice glossy art paper that makes any book feel special.
This is above all else a technique-demonstration vehicle and many techniques are illustrated from highlighting to working with resin and for that reason alone this is a worthwhile addition to your collection.
Modelling focus
I am a big fan of quality reference and scale modelling material as many of you will hopefully appreciate as we recently added our 200th set of detailed walkaround images to SMN’s Photo Reference Library. One of the main reasons I stopped writing for paper magazines is that coverage of the build-up, painting and weathering as well as a dire lack of help with the ‘how-to’ is so poor – hence launching SMN. This new title is excellent because it shows just how Daniel got from initial construction to finally completing his ZM P-51D – something I try to ensure with every build we have here in SMN.
Overall then…
I would certainly recommend this new title as it has plenty of good ‘how-to’ help, reference material, images and profiles and look forward to the next title in what looks like a very interesting series.
Recommended
Geoff C.