Wednesday 28 March 2012

Featured work - Scale Military Modeller magazine

Magazines used to be the bread and butter of the hobbits before the interweb came along. But you only have to visit your local news agent to see that among the modelling fraternity printed monthlies are still very popular.

I put this down to modellers being tactile people who are also very visually minded, they like to see nice big high resolution photos of models, after all that's what all that painstaking detailing is all about! I have flipped through several - shockingly expensive - mags before I settled on buying Scale Military Modeller International. It seems to regularly feature a good variety of projects across the scales and isn't too skimpy with the pages, though I still cringe a little at the £4.25 cover price.

Even so, I only buy a magazine when it has at least a couple of articles that specifically interest me, and that's true of this months SMMI. There's a terrific feature on 'winterizing' a Sherman and an even more impressive step-by-step guide to producing a 'what if?' improved Sherman concept.


To me, this is what so good about scale modelling, the quest for accuracy is all well and good but having the ability to build what you want means that all sorts of concepts - that did and didn't get off the drawing board - can be modelled as well. The featured Sherman concept is a very good case in point and Shermaholics regularly debate the M4s features and weaknesses so it's nice to see how designers of the time also shared the concerns about the tanks less desirable design aspects and were thinking about how they could have been improved upon.

I really felt I got my money's worth with this issue.

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