Building and Detailing AMT's 1/48 Scale B-26 Marauder Book Review

By Michael Benolkin

Here's another interesting build project manual from Mike Ashey Publishing. Mike decided to combine the intuitive step-by-step photo-based instructions together with a format that is easy to use on the workbench. This title covers AMT's 1/48 B-26 Marauder (also released under the ESCI/ERTL banner) from start to finish.

If you look at the sample images, you can see a similar format to some of the better European modeling magazines (when you can find them), but unlike those magazines, each title is focused on one subject from beginning to end and has no advertising. What's more, each title comes wrapped and ready to be loaded into a three-ring binder. With this binder approach, you can open each page flat without fighting the binding or breaking the binding of some publications. Each page is printed with full-color photography and instructions provided in English only.

While the Monogram 1/48 B-26 is still widely available and periodically reissued, the AMT tooling is one of those subjects not yet reissued by Italeri, but can be found in kit swaps for reasonable prices. The AMT kit does have a number of glitches which need to be addressed, and this title walks you through the process of building the kit.

As shown in the sample page above, the author provides some useful techniques for filling gaps in the kit assemblies which will be useful for other challenging subjects. This kit requires quite a bit of filling, but the techniques used differentiate the master modeler from the novice.

If you're planning to build AMT's B-26 kit or want to see how the experienced modelers tackle ill-fitting kits, you'll want to have a copy of this reference on your bench.

One other advantage to this series is that you can order what you need, when you need them, or collection them all for future projects.

My sincere thanks to Mike Ashey Publishing for this review copy!