Building and Detailing Hasegawa's 1/32 Scale P-47D Thunderbolt Book Review

By Michael Benolkin

Here's a relatively new publisher - 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 the Hasegawa 1/32 P-47D Bubbletop Thunderbolt but you'll find good information in here for any of their Dauntlesses (and they did them all).

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.

Many believe that the Hasegawa 1/32 Thunderbolt is one of the best models straight out of the box, and while it is a great model, it does have a few quirks of note. This title provides useful insights to those issues and how to correct them. As you can see in the sample images, this title also has useful tips on finishing and painting the model (techniques useful for many other modeling projects as well).

If you're planning to build Hasegawa's big Thunderbolt or Eduard's limited edition rebox of this same kit, 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!