Adam's Armor Volume 1 Construction - Review

Working with Dave at Last Cavalry has been an eye opening experience. I am primarily an aircraft and figure guy while Dave is a figure and armor guy. We both get excited over the new figure releases that are coming out from a lot of great companies. However there are times when I'm trying to convince him of the need for more aircraft representation in our assortment and Dave counters with the great stuff that is coming out in the armor world. So a couple of weeks ago I was pushing the need for some 1/32 scale WWI pilot figures and British PC-10 decals from Aviatic when Dave throws the new Adam Wilder Adam's Armor 1 – Construction book on my desk. Dave asked me to look at the book and let him know what I thought. I'm basically a “build 'em out of the box” modeller with, maybe, a little weathering on the aircraft and was expecting to see all sorts of olive and green tanks covered in mud.

After looking at the book I was pretty impressed. Volume 1 covers construction and Volume 2 covers weathering and painting. Much of Volume 1 deals with a lot of basic construction techniques, but goes further and illustrates ideas that can be used in many areas of the modelling world. Basic texturing is one area where the use of puttys, epoxies, micro-balloons, scratching can create a lot of interesting effects. How to work with photo etch is another helpful area. It's not as detailed as Adam's DVD, Dealing with Photoetch but covers some basic techniques and more. I have to say Adam does a great job illustrating his techniques. The captions are well written and very descriptive. The clarity of both the pictures and the captions are the major selling points of these books. There are many books out there that show us how to become better modellers, but there are few that do it as well as the Wilder books. I would recommend this book for all modellers, including us aircraft guys. There is always more we can learn and try.