Please To Understand!

Yesterday I bought a new model, a 1/35th scale "SAM-6 Antiaircraft missile" from Trumpeter. I don't really like Trumpeter very much, for reasons I may go into later, but for now I'm mostly going to hoot at the instruction sheet.

It says it right up front: Study and understand these instructions thoroughly before beginning assembly. And that's certainly good advice. But what, exactly, are we to try to understand?

Foist off, we find the parts list, where we find that the kit includes two "pastern ducts". What's a pastern duct? The material itself looks like small-diameter vinyl or rubber tubing. Okay, I understand, but my confidence has been strained.

Moving on, we encounter "Track Costruction". There goes a bit more of my confidence, but we move along for a few pages without any issues and I start to feel better about things.

And then, Step 12, we have "Guided Bomb Assembly". I think that should be "guided missile assembly", but what do I know? And then in step 13, we have a requirement to install some of the pastern duct and step 14 instructs us on "attaching lunch pad".

In step 15 the wheels really fall off the cart, for we are "attaching guided bomb" and installing "pastern duck" (NOT pastern duct, but apparently a whole new order of creation). The next step builds up the "Immobility Rack", something better known as a travel lock. And the penultimate step, 19, has us "Attaching stanspont state hand rail".

How's the model look? It looks okay. But the documentation is a shambles. The decal sheet clearly shows markings for a Soviet, an East German, a Polish and a Czech example. But the color painting and decal sheet only shows the East German and Czech examples. The instructions were clearly proofread by Inspector Clouseau.

People get angry at me for scolding instructions for being badly translated, poorly edited, and incompetently proofread. "You're being too hard on them," the cognoscenti tell me. "They're trying really hard and you're faulting them for things that don't matter."

Things that don't matter... Writing, one of mankind's most precious talents, doesn't matter. Hmm. One would think that a company that clearly intends to become a major force in the model industry would have enough pride and professionalism to have just one English-speaking person scan the instructions, but I guess not. Hell, I'll do it for them - it'd take me, what, five minutes to correct the goofy mistakes in the instruction sheet and tell their art department to document the other two marking options on the decal sheet. (And while I'm at it, who decided on East German and Polish versions when the two most glaringly obvious versions should have been Syrian and Egyptian?)

And I think it does matter. If they can't get basic grammar and spelling on the instruction sheet right, or even close to right, what else can't they get right? Is this the same sort of thinking that, um, leads to propylene glycol in toothpaste, by chance?

But Trumpeter is big news. The model shop nerds positively wet themselves in their ardor for Trumpeter kits, but I'm not impressed. It's not xenophobia. I like a great many foreign kit manufacturers, including the equally Chinese company Dragon. But Trumpeter? It leaves me about as cold as bubble-gum-flavored Jell-O.