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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m pleased to announce that our latest title, Building the Wingnut Wings AEG G.IV Late in 1/32 Scale, is now available!
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.
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:
Finished gallery images are not cluttered with competing text and graphics:
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.
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:
It has come to my attention that the Birddog book contained a duplicate page, with page 96 being the same as page 95 with a different layout. My humble apologies for this error!
I’ve removed the duplicate page and updated the book on the website, so if you’ve already purchased and downloaded the book, the download link you have in your email inbox should be valid to re-download it. If this doesn’t work, please contact me directly and I’ll organise to get an updated copy to you.
Mea culpa!
I’m pleased to announce that our second title, Building Mac’s Birddog in 1/32 Scale: A Scale Tribute to Macaulay “Mac” Cottrell, is now available!
Written by master modeller Eric Galliers, this 132-page digital book shows you how he built his award-winning 1/32 scale model of Macaulay “Mac the FAC” Cottrell’s Cessna O-1 Birddog. Using the Roden 1/32 scale kit as a basis, Eric modifies it to represent Mac’s Birddog as he flew it in Vietnam in 1968.
The book also includes Mac’s recollections of his 47 years in the RAAF, along with his citations for the Silver Star and DFC for an action in Vietnam. We’ve also included an exclusive 53-page walkaround, featuring a whopping 95 photos by Rob Fox of Rob Fox Photography.
The book is available to purchase in PDF format for $15 (Australian) at the “Buy now” button below:
Photographing our scale models can feel like a black art at times, and it can be a frustrating process for those of us who post images of our work for public consumption, whether that be online, or in books and magazines. Often, our photos simply don’t do justice to our lovingly-crafted creations.
I experience this very struggle myself, and am constantly on the lookout for ways to improve my results. One of the secrets to quality miniature photography (or any photography, really) is lighting, and I recently stumbled across a portable lightbox that seemed ideally suited to photographing small assemblies and parts:
Being a mere AU$12 on eBay, I figured I had nothing to lose by trying one out—especially after seeing Matt McDougall’s post about a similar unit he had purchased. The thing that really appealed to me about this bit of kit, however, was that it comes with built-in USB-powered LED strip lighting! A USB cable with integral switch is supplied:
It has a standard USB plug (USB-A) at one end, while the end that plugs into the lighting strip features a micro-USB plug (micro-B). Here’s what the LED strip lighting looks like:
Now, I already have a large photo table with studio lights on each side, but I wanted something that would allow me to take quick in-progress photos of small sub-assemblies, such as engines and cockpits, where the light source is closer to the object.
The unit comes as a folded flat-pack, tucked inside a carry sleeve of sorts. I found it awkward to release the unit from its folded state (confession: I had to get my wife to do it!), but once extended, the sides come together in three layers, and are clipped together with a press-stud arrangement.
The unit appears to be made from some kind of PVC plastic, and while durable enough, it’s a little flimsy once assembled, and the sides on mine curve inwards, rather than being stiffly upright. I may try to affix something stiff to the external sides to keep them perpendicular.
The lightbox itself has a small footprint, being 23.5cm high and 22cm front-to-back. Width is also 22cm. So, it’s not really suitable for taking photos of completed aircraft models, or particularly large assemblies. It would comfortably handle figures and small-scale armour, however.
You also get five coloured inserts to use as backdrops for your photos—red, blue, green, black, and white:
These inserts only cover the floor and rear of the lightbox, so whichever colour you use, the sides will still be white. I like to photograph against as light a background colour as possible, generally, so I put the white insert into my unit for these test photos. The other colours are too strident for my liking.
As I’ve already noted, the LED strip lighting is USB-powered, so something like a phone charger is an ideal power source—provided you can set up near a power outlet! Luckily, I had something better: a portable USB power brick:
It’s basically just an external battery that is charged, and provides charge, via USB. Very handy!
Here’s what the unit looks like powered on:
Unfortunately the combined weight of the USB cable and switch has conspired to pull the right corner down a little bit, but this did not interfere with testing. You can see in the photo above just how severe the sidewalls curve in, and this is definitely blocking a small amount of light from reaching the work surface.
For testing, I used Quickboost’s 1/32 F4U-1D resin engine (QB 32 036). Here’s the initial photo, uncropped and unedited in any way, other than to reduce its dimensions:
It’s relatively dark, and has a mild blue/green cast. This is as much a function of the deficiencies of my camera than anything else. There’s also an odd pattern of overlapping lines in the foreground, which I suspect are caused by shadows from the curved sides. You can also see that the the lower rear corners have gaps through to the outside world, which limits the width of any object you can capture cleanly, without having to resort to editing out the background.
As I always shoot in RAW these days, it becomes a simple task to correct the while balance and exposure levels on images like the one above, so the image below shows the result of this editing, along with cropping out the unwanted corners:
Much better, and more than acceptable! I think there’s still a slight green cast in the part itself (along with some JPEG artefacts), but I don’t see this as an issue.
Sadly, I don’t think it’ll replace my larger set up for small parts any time soon:
So, what do I think? Well, it’s a very cheap solution, and it shows in places. Even while preparing this review, the double-sided tape holding the LED strip lighting in place started to let go (thanks to me leaving the USB cable dangling from it). The bending in of the sides is also annoying, but I will seek to address that somehow, and will re-test the unit if I do. A couple of my backdrops arrived with dents in them, too.
But for AU$12, I really can’t complain. While no substitute for my full photo rig, this unit will certainly allow me to take in-progress photos away from it, such as at the workbench itself, or even at a fellow modeller’s house.
The real value of a unit like this, however, lies in the utility it offers modellers who wish to improve their in-progress photography without having to invest in a large and potentially expensive studio set up. Sure, you’ll outgrow it quite quickly during the progress of any large build, but it’s a handy little unit all the same. If I’m able to fix the issue with the collapsing sides, I’ll test it again a publish the results.
We’re pleased to announce that the first title in our Build Guide Series is well under way! Written by Karim Bibi, it will cover the Wingnut Wings 1/32 AEG G.IV ‘late’ kit. Not only does it feature a detailed step-by-step guide to how Karim produced his fabulous model, but also dedicated tutorials on biplane rigging, and painting wooden propellors. Also included will be a set of walkaround photos featuring the Mercedes D.IVa engine located at the Royal Museum of the Army, in Brussels, Belgium.
Below are a couple of teaser images of the build to whet your appetite!
Keep an eye out on the website, or our Facebook page, for more information about Building the Wingnut Wings AEG G.IV Late in 1/32 Scale. We’ll bring you updates as soon as we have them to hand.
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