Further Clarification

I bought an airplane model recently. It was manufactured in the Republic of South Korea. The directions were translated in Borneo by a Komodo Dragon.

They were so unclear that I was fairly certain I was building a balsa wood and paper submarine. The description in step 14...which by the way came before step 12...consisted of the phrase: "After a time, constracted fuserage." It seems evident that the intention of the sentence was to show what the finished fuselage was to look like. But step 14 was about how to attach the "papre to the winges with the thinning grue."

That was as clear as it got. Normally, I would at this point be thanking the stars that the pieces were pre-cut. And I truly wanted to do so. But when I snapped out the components for the winges, they were of different sizes and the shapes didn't seem symmetrical at all. I decided that the plane must be designed to fly in slow circles so you couldn't lose it. I can accept that.

Having finished the winges, I must say I had built a handsome boomerang. And it only weighed about half an ounce. This was useful, since there were no instructions at all on how to attach them to the constracted fuserage, except an arrow that began at a corner of the sheet and snaked its way to the top of the fuserage, just behind the cockpit. The legend for the arrow simply read: "Frat spot." I opted to grue the winges to the frat spot on the top of the plane.

Now, this is a "ruber band power of plane" and near as I can tell, you have to attach the ruber band to the tail section hook and to the "spiner brades in the noses cone" before you cover the fuserage with paper. But step 16 tells you how and when to do that and I had a "constracted fuserage" after step 14,...which as we all know, came before step 12.

So, now I had a constracted fuserage with no motive power since the ruber band lay in the box and the whole thing was grued together already. But it looked very cool. The winges were at an odd angle to the body of the plane and the tail...it had no tail. The tail parts were not in the kit. There was a mention of the tail on the instruction sheet. It clearly indicated how to bend the "elevatings" up, to make the "plane arcing into higher post of the sky." It also indicated in centimeters the proper "angle for make winges tip apart." But there were no parts in the box.

There did seem to be an abundance of tissue paper to wrap the missing parts. So, I took a whack at it with my x-acto knife and the excess balsa from the parts I did have. I carved out what semed a fair tail approximation. This was fine. The way I cut out parts and the way the manufacturer cut out parts...we were neck and neck.

Soon I had a finished plane. And it was a beauty. I spray-painted it bright red and in honor of it's design, appropriately named it: "Ker-wham!"

I took it up on the roof of my parents' home since it had no ruber band power of plane, and launched it into the mild breezes of Long Island. It sailed exactly as expected, in a lazy left arc. Suddenly, like a cartoon character realizing it had run out of cliff, it stalled in mid-air. I could almost imagine it looking down and turning to look out at me with a nervous gulp. Then it took a perpendicular-to-the-earth nose dive straight out of a thousand dogfight movies. All it lacked was the sound of a dive whine. An instant later, it both lived down to and screamed out it's name. Ker-Wham became "Ker-Was," shattering into a million pieces, ironically, against the windshield of my Hyundai Santa Fe.

I decided at this point to write the manufacturer a letter to complain about the missing parts and the useless directions. They replied politely, with the following paragraph:

"It is painful to engage a fine costumer as you of such unhappiness. We will endeavour a kit of better behaviour and with more transliterred instractions."

I am not hopeful.