This 565-page eBook features Peter‘s award-winning conversion of the HpH Models 1/18 Seafire 47 to represent a Spitfire XIVe—specifically, Race #80, as flown by James McArthur in the Tinnerman Air Races at Cleveland, Ohio, on September 4th 1949.
Peter rebuilt much of the airframe, scratch-built most of the detail parts in aluminium and brass, and covered the model in aluminium litho-plate for an authentic natural metal finish. Peter’s model won the National Senior Champion award (among many others) at Scale Model World in Telford in November 2017, and its construction is presented here in forensic detail.
Not only does the book contain a blow-by-blow account of every stage of the build, including how Peter fashioned many of the intricate details, but also:
an illustrated account of the history of TZ138 by noted aviation illustrator and author Juanita Franzi;
a 12-page tutorial on Turning Small Parts with a Rotary Tool;
a 33-page tutorial on Designing Your Own Photo Etch Parts;
a 16-page tutorial on Skinning Models in Metal;
a 15-page tutorial on Forming Metal Around Compound Curves;
bonus: seven full-page walkaround photos of a Spitfire Mk 19 seat.
This book is a must-have for aspiring scratch-builders, Spitfire fans, and any modeller interested in learning from the best.
The book is $22 Australian dollars as a downloadable PDF from our store. Please check out the sample pages below:
Barely a week after posting that our next book, Peter Castle’s Building Race #80 Spitfire Mk XIVe in 1/18 Scale, had clocked up a massive 300 pages, I now have to report that it has just blasted through 400 pages! The sheer scale and scope of Peter’s magnificent build has necessitated the book growing to an unanticipated size, but this just makes it all the more compelling!
This will mean that this title will be slightly more expensive than our previous three releases, but much better value on a page-per-dollar basis. I’d like to say that we’ll be ready to publish in a couple of weeks, but with so much amazing content to sort through and fashion into pages, I’m not prepared to guarantee it!
After a longer-than-expected forced hiatus, work resumed recently on preparing our newest title, Peter Castle’s Building Race #80 Spitfire Mk XIVe in 1/18 Scale.
The book, much like the model itself, is fast becoming an absolute monster, and has now breached the 300-page mark! It will not only cover the building of Peter’s model in exquisite detail, but will also feature several technique tutorials from Peter himself, a handy set of walkaround photos of a Spitfire seat by Tony Taylor, and an article and artwork on #80 from Juanita Franzi.
Work continues at a feverish pace, and it’s about 70% done. I’m hoping we’re now only a matter of weeks away from publication.
I’ve just added a new section to the website called “Partners”. This will feature information and links about the people and organisations who help make our books possible.
Just a quick note to point out that the “My Account” link has been moved from the main navigation menu, to the upper right area of the screen, just to the left of the search field. This has been done to allow for future expansion of the main menu, and hopefully won’t cause too much confusion!
Please contact me if this change has caused any issues for you.
While the vast majority of purchases from our website go off without a hitch, I do receive the occasional email from customers experiencing issues. As it happens, these issues tend to fall into a couple of common areas, which are easily solved or avoided, so let’s take a look at them.
Purchasing
This is a relatively straightforward process, and the feedback I’ve had about it suggests that there are no real issues with the checkout process. Prices are in Australian dollars, and payment is made via PayPal—you can even checkout using PayPal as a guest, meaning that you don’t need to have a PayPal account to use it.
Downloading
Once the order is placed and payment is made, you should receive an order confirmation email that contains your order details, plus a link to download your purchase. This appears to be the main area where things can go wrong, with customers either not receiving this email, or not realising its significance and deleting it. And don’t forget to check your junk or spam email folder!
The screenshot below shows how the Downloads section of the order confirmation email should appear. There should be one row in the table for each book you purchased. Note the “Download” column at the far right of the table—this contains the link to download that particular book (you’ll need to download each book you have purchased individually):
It’s worth noting that some browsers will launch a new blank window or tab to facilitate the download, and this can make it appear as if the download didn’t work. You should still see a download progress indicator of some description, and the blank window or tab should close once the download has successfully completed.
The book should be downloaded to the default download location set by your browser or operating system. On both macOS and Windows systems, this will be your “Downloads” folder. If you’re not sure whether the book has downloaded, check that location and see if it’s there.
If you don’t receive the order confirmation email, contact me and I can generate another one for you. Depending on the reason for not receiving the initial email, it’s possible you may not receive the second one either. This is where the solution below comes in.
Create an Account
Many of our customers use the guest checkout option (as a guest of the site, as distinct from using the guest payment facility with PayPal), which is quick and easy to do. And while this is convenient, creating a dedicated customer account has several advantages, and we highly recommend doing so!
Firstly, once you’ve created the account, subsequent purchases are actually faster, as you’re no longer asked to supply your details if you make a purchase while logged in.
More importantly, however, is that you then have access to your purchase and download history, and this means that you can log in to your account and download any book you’ve previously purchased from the Downloads section of your account. Not only does this solve the issue of not having received the order confirmation email, but it also means you can log in to your account from a different computer or device to the one that contains the email, and still download the book.
Arguably the most important reason of all to create an account is that it’s the best way to gain access to the regular updates to our books we publish. Any book you purchase is eligible for lifetime free updates—when a new version is available, you simply need to log in to your account and re-download the book again. (If you still have the original order confirmation email containing the download links, they will work too.)
If you’ve already purchased books from the site without a customer account, and then decide to create one, once you’ve done so, I can associate those purchases with your new account, and they will then become part of your purchase history. Please note that this doesn’t happen automatically, so if you’re in that position, contact me with the details and I can make the associations.
Of course, not everyone is interested in creating an account, so if all else fails, contact me and I can get the file to you directly by other means. This should be a last resort, however, and I strongly encourage everyone to create a customer account in order to gain some added control over your purchases, and avoid potential problems into the future!
Over the weekend of November 11 & 12, The Australian Capital Territory Scale Modelers’ Society (ACTSMS) held the ScaleACT model show and competition. By all accounts, it was a great show, but one particular incident had special significance for KLP Publishing.
The subject of our first title (Building Brick’s Sabre in 1/32 Scale), Kevin Bricknell, was again awarded the honour of a tribute build of an aircraft he flew during his career. This time, it was his PC-9, and the modeller was Andrew Doppel.
Congratulations to Brick for another well-deserved tribute, and also to Andrew Doppel for creating such a fine model. Thanks also to Andrew for permission to use his photos.
We’re pleased to announce that the next title in our Build Special Series will be Building Race #80 Spitfire Mk XIVe in 1/18 Scale, and will feature Peter Castle‘s amazing conversion of the HpH 1/18 scale Seafire FR 47 to Spitfire Mk XIVe configuration.
Peter’s model represents the Spitfire Mk XIVe (ex TZ138) being raced in Tinnerman Air Races at Cleveland, Ohio, and piloted by James McArthur to 3rd place on September 4th, 1949.
Peter scratch-built a great many parts for his model (much of it in brass), and covered it in aluminium litho plate. It truly is one of the most spectacular models you’re ever likely to see!
You’ll be able to witness this model in person at Scale ModelWorld in Telford this coming weekend, November 11 & 12, where it will be in competition. We wish Peter luck in the competition, though we suspect he doesn’t need it! We will report back on the results after the event.
In the meantime, work has commenced on document Peter’s amazing build in eBook format, which is a tour de force of model making techniques. We’ll bring you more news of the book’s progress as it comes to hand.
Written by expert modeller Karim Bibi, this 167-page digital book takes you through building the impressive Wingnut Wings 1/32 scale AEG G.IV Late kit. Karim shows you the building, painting, decalling, and weathering techniques he used to produce his stunning model, including how to produce paint masks to replicate the iconic nose markings.
The book also includes a 29-page tutorial on painting wood-grain effects on propellors, and a handy 12-page tutorial on the rigging techniques that Karim used on this model. In addition, there’s a 12-page walkaround of the Mercedes D.IVa engine used on the AEG G.IV, and a bonus chapter featuring some period documentation on the engine.
The book is available to purchase in PDF format for $15 (Australian) at the “Buy now” button below:
I’m often asked about why we don’t offer print versions of our books, so I thought I’d take some time to answer this question, and to fully explain our decision to focus on digital books.
Having owned, reviewed, or otherwise been exposed to a great many modelling guides over the years, I began to notice that many of them shared the same set of unavoidable shortcomings. These were largely due to the limitations of the print format, and not necessarily any fault of the good people involved in their production.
The print process for books and magazines is complex and expensive, and necessarily entails a high level of risk—no publisher or author wants to get lumbered with a warehouse full of unsold books and a substantial financial loss. In print, pages cost money, and none more so than the glossy, heavily illustrated variety. Therefore, one of the overarching constraints of the print medium is the need to keep the page count to a financially-viable maximum, and this often manifests itself in text and images that are too small, and cramped layouts that can be difficult to follow at times.
It seemed to me that the best way to solve these issues would be to avoid print altogether.
Our Manifesto
The decision to go with a digital format opens up a range of possibilities and options not readily available in print, and collectively they drive our content first ethos. Rather than treat digital publishing as a poor cousin of print publishing, we decided to exploit the inherent advantages of the medium to the benefit of the reader.
To that end, our primary guiding principle is let the content determine the page count. Our books are as long (or as short) as they need to be to convey the relevant content appropriately, and if additional content surfaces, we can add that in too, without fear of breaking some arbitrary page count limit. In effect, there is no page limit.
The freedom to design books of any page length allows us to use larger font sizes, and to display images at the maximum size allowable. This approach requires more pages for a given amount of content, but we’ve already seen that this is not a problem.
Build photos are not tiny thumbnails, and a single image may in fact occupy half (or more) of the available space on a page:
We also use a larger text size than most print publications, to make it easy on aging eyes—you don’t even have to pinch and zoom! Our layouts are deliberately clean and simple, without distracting backgrounds that can make text hard to read.
Our books also include live links to product websites and other online resources, right in the text.
Walkaround images, where included, are displayed as large as possible, and a single photograph may even occupy an entire page:
The freedom from the constraints of fixed page counts means we can include content in our books that would not be feasible in a print format—such as extended walkaround sections, comprehensive technique tutorials, much more detailed building and painting sequences, and additional content as appropriate to the book in question.
Free Book Updates!
One of the really great advantages of digital publications is the ability to publish updates as required—these updates could include anything from corrected typos and other errors, to entire new sections of content. Best of all, these updated versions of our books are made available to existing purchasers for free! You can read more about this in the following article here on our website:
Yeah, we understand that, and we do too! We’re not proposing that printed books are redundant, or that you have to pledge your allegiance to one camp or the other. We simply feel that the nature of the content we plan to publish is better served in a digital format, and conversely, is not viable in the print medium. Some of our planned titles will cover specialised or niche modelling topics, and would be completely untenable as printed books.
In the meantime, we’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic, either here in the comments, or on our Facebook page.
Cheers!
Truly a new way of presenting airplane publications to the aviation enthusiast, much like technical manual revisions in the airline industry. I love looking at all the pictures on my iPad ― Yoav Efrati
Love the eBook format! Detailed descriptions + images of the actual product used are great! Well done KLP! ― Carl Gerard
Anyone who hasn’t looked at this series should really check it out. All of the builds are top-notch and truly inspirational. Some of the best modeling references available at a price that can’t be beat! ― Rockie Yarwood
To learn more about purchasing and downloading our books, please check out the following companion article:
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