Breaking Your Trimaster Virginity

Trimaster! 25 years ago it was a name to strike awe into the hearts of aircraft modellers. It was a company whose product was to be approached in an attitude of genuflection, because it embodied a quality never seen before. Well – I’m not sure if that was really the case, ‘Tamigawa’ were pretty sophisticated in the late 80s, and recessed panel lines were not unknown, if still comparatively rare.

Trimaster burst upon the scene with a flock, a veritable schwarm of German WWII subjects that captured the attention of the specialist market, focussing on the Fw 190 in many of its variants, but not ignoring the Me 262 in many of its own, and even the Me 163 rocket plane. The company had a high production value, a quality which in the end may have been its downfall, as Trimaster closed its doors eventually. Its moulds have had considerably longer life, though, being issued in large volume by Dragon, and in a later incarnation boxed by Italeri.

It was one of these latter that tempted me to “break my Trimaster virginity,” with the Ta 152 H-1, one of the last and most derived variants of the Fw 190 airframe, perhaps Kurt Tank’s ‘ninth symphony,’ a fighter so advanced that it was almost unmanageable by the barely-trained pilots left by the time it was delivered. Nevertheless, it is remembered for the extraordinary technical achievement it was.

Given Trimaster’s reputation, I expected big things. I got an unusual subject with engraved detail and fair parts fit… And that was about it. I say fair fit, but in many cases it was sloppy, and betrayed poor engineering appreciation for the realities of building. An instrument panel attached by a couple of millimetres of its edge would be impossible without superglue, and is barely practical even so. Sprue gates on the thin ends of parts, such as the pitot tube, anticipate a rare dexterity on the part of the modeller to even free the parts intact from the tree, let alone clean them up. The sliding canopy was conceptually good but engineered to tolerances too coarse for it to actually work, leaving you with a canopy which neither slides nor actually fits against the windscreen. The various parts of the main gear bay lined up so poorly that major filing and sanding was required for the wing to close at all, and with so much forcing happening it is unsurprising that the upper wing halves did not snug down accurately enough to avoid “overbite” at the tips, one way or another.

Add to that Italeri’s often vague instructions and indifferent decals, and you have a recipe for a lot of work to get a decent result. I ended up leaving some parts off – two oblique braces in the gear bay, to be added from the outside after main assembly, for instance – the plans gave few clues as to how they fit. Likewise, the aft-most antenna under the fuselage had no locator hole and the plans made no mention of opening one until it was essentially too late. Okay, I could have taken a needle and drill to the centreline of a perfectly mated, flushed and painted fuselage and made a hole, but at what risk? Likewise, the two short indicators that rose through the wings to tell the pilot the gear was locked down had no locator holes either, when finally examined in close detail, and were left off for the same reason. The main gear struts were moulded with the shock absorber in the fully extended – unloaded – position, giving the aircraft a distinctly nose-high attitude, though if they had been moulded compressed the moraine antenna on the underside would have barely cleared the ground. A small brace piece in the tailwheel assembly had no attachment points, and the plans gave few hints… The exhausts were moulded to be attached from the inside, but fitted so curiously, on long mounting lugs, that they would have resided entirely inside the compartment, while in reality they should be entirely outside.

I made a series of modifications and simplifications (alright, omissions) to get the job done. The exhausts I replaced with the Quickboost parts for Tamiya’s Fw 190 D-9, which needed some modification and clever use of styrene stripstock to mount them, but looked a lot better (although the resin of the parts is so fine on the open exhaust throats that it in fact broke away in many places, almost nullifying the object of improving a defect.) I added Eduard etched harness in the cockpit, a basic improvement that is pretty much second nature these days, then did my best to wrestle the beast into submission.

This finally involved replacing many decals with generic insignia, swastikas and data from an Aeromaster sheet, using the H-1 data and individual aircraft codes from the Italeri sheet but omitting the wing walk dashed lines as it appeared the decals were silvering badly, and, as I had seen the same subject depicted minus these markings, I felt justified in leaving them out. The same with the loading chart data on the outside of the gear bay doors – the decal as supplied is too large to fit and the subject is sometimes seen without them. The red flashes marking the trim tabs were far too large for the tabs on all tail surfaces so these were painted red by hand. In the end I did not rig the main radio antenna wire either; after a long process of soft masking and spraying the three-tone scheme and DOR bands, and wrestling with panel accents in lines which were inconsistent across the airframe and thus sometimes unable to hold a wash, I just wanted it finished. The landing gear reduced me to that state I call “superglue and prayer,” and, while it worked, it was a close thing. The next day, the  model was in the display case.

I certainly hope Trimaster lifted their game as they went. Perhaps this was one of their earlier efforts, part of a learning curve. I have at least 16 other kits which trace their origins to Trimaster in one incarnation or another, and I do not look forward to a fight like this again. In contrast, Hobby Boss has virtually copied their engineering in some aspects for their D- and C-series 190s, but tightened the tolerances until it works correctly. Not quite shake and bake kits, but close, and definitely playing the big guys from Shizuoka City at their own game.

I’ll have a review of Hobby Boss’s D-9 at a later date, and it will be written in light of my experiences on this current model, as a bench mark for the changes a quarter of a century makes in the state of this particular art and science. At the end of the day, I have a Ta 152 which looks good among its brethren in the case, the paintjob is attractive, and in many cases I can justify my choices at a research level rather than one of slack modelling, and that’s a good note to close on.