A-1H Skyraider Concept Note Book Review

By Michael Benolkin

Review

Zoukei-Mura Inc. has certainly raised the bar on the quality of kits produced in 1/32 scale. As part of this strategy, they've published a series of monographs, one for each major subject produced, under the banner of Concept Note. This is the third in the series and covers the Douglas A-1H Skyraider kit.

The title is published in Japanese and English with narrative and captions provided in both languages. The idea behind Concept Note is to provide the modeler with a one-stop reference for how the real subject looks and how the model looks at each stage in the assembly process. What's more, you're not looking at just one modeler's approach to the subject, there are several examples shown with full-color photos of each throughout their assembly process. Each modeler has chosen a different way to portray the aircraft with varying levels of flight readiness or open maintenance going on so you can examine what these options look like and how they will work for your own project.

There are numerous photos of the full-scale subject, but with the wealth of information available on the Skyraider, this title focuses on more builds of the kit including one interesting backdate to a French AD-4N. With each builder's approach to the model, from detailing to set-up for display, you get some really interesting looks at possibilities for your own 1/32 Skyraider project. Some of the builds employ the figures produced for this kit from Zoukei-Mura. One of the more interesting features is a photo spread in the beginning of the title of the Skyraider aboard ship. I'd never seen these photos in any Skyraider reference published to date and then on closer look, you can see that the team had build several of these models in the same squadron colors with different MODEX numbers and placed them into an interesting display. In a few shots, Photoshop was used to fill in the rest of the squadron, but this shows yet another interesting approach to modeling.

Whether you're tackling your own Zoukei-Mura 1/32 A-1H or A-1J Skyraider, one of Trumpeter's recent AD kits, or Tamiya's 1/48 kit, this great reference will help you attain the detail and appearance of the aircraft beyond the simplified painting instructions in each kit.

Definitely recommended!

This title can be purchased from the Volks USA store.

My sincere thanks to Zoukei-Mura Inc. for this review sample!