Product Review: MicroScale Trimfilm (and how I don’t seem to have the knack…)

 I’ve used MicroScale Industries products for many years and have the greatest respect for the firm. Established in 1933, they’ve been serving the modelling community even longer than Kalmbach Publishing, and their decals are legendary. In the days before everyone and his uncle was churning out decals through computerised imaging systems, Krasel Industries was the big guy on the block, and when they split into MicroScale and SuperScale, many years ago, it was double the bang for your buck, one firm catering to railroaders and others, the other to the burgeoning military enthusiast marketplace. First of all, I would like to say that I have over 400 sheets of SuperScale decals in my collection, and know their quality, plus seven of MicroScale’s finishing products which I use with confidence. So why am I complaining about Trimfilm? Trimfilm was a great idea. Solid colour sheets, and sheets of generic designs, stripes, checkerboards, in a variety of colours and gauges, a mix-and-match solution for a thousand different graphical challenges. Add to these a wide range of typestyle sheets, fonts, sizes and colours, and you have a resource to rustle up detailing at the drop of a hat. That’s the theory: what about practise? Maybe practice is what I need, because I can’t get the stuff to cooperate. I tried using Trimfilm on an SF scratchbuild or two, e.g., the bold red stripes around the rear fuselage of the MEV from Thunderbirds Are Go, and found to my frustration that the half-inch red stripe material had no intention of cooperating. The thinness, so valuable in getting small decals to conform to surface contours, made the material so fragile that it shattered if I breathed on it. It tended to break up while merely detaching from the backing paper, was quite impossible to move effectively once it was on the surface, and grabbed almost at once in any case, drying decidedly lumpy over a surface wet-polished smooth. I tried several times to get the material to do what I wanted it to, then gave up and sprayed the stripes instead. Perhaps I had hold of a defective sheet, I thought, and tried other sheets and other gauges. The red stripe around the MEV is flanked by two finer black stripes and I did these with eighth-inch Trimfilm. The story was the same, and I pieced the lines together from multiple fragments of broken decal, not enjoying the process. When I came to do the wing walkway lines on my scratchbuilt F-116 fighter from Joe-90 I found myself using the same material by necessity, but having no more rewarding an experience. For black lines around the engine nacelles I had far better luck spraying flat black and masking with Tamiya tape, and for some lines circling the nacelles I actually sprayed the tape black and applied it permanently, because the tape will stretch symmetrically across a two-dimensional curve, and decal film essentially will not. This is unfortunate. Perhaps my technique is off, maybe I don’t have a sufficiently gentle touch to use this material: if it behaved like most decals usually do for me it would be great, but it didn’t (which is odd, as I’ve used SuperScale aircraft decals before and had no trouble with them). Maybe I should have reinforced them with Liquid Decal Film to keep them from shattering. I’m still drawn to the range, though, a sort of love-hate relationship. All those pre-made items are creative candy! And the typestyles suggest custom lettering on home-designed projects (though to be fair, custom made decals have made a very effective challenge to the idea of piecing logos together a letter at a time.) For now I’ll say that my Trimfilm collection lies in its box, forlorn and neglected, awaiting either a renewed sense of adventure on my part or the wisdom of those who know how to make it behave. Check out the enormous range at: http://www.microscale.com/