AMT/ERTL Star Wars Droid Trifighter

Background

Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away (it seems like last year in my local theater), George Lucas completed his final installment to the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy depicting the rise of Darth Vader. In this episode, we're also introduced to another robotic weapon of the age - the Droid Trifighter. This was another interesting bit of technological 'filler' put into the space combat scenes. Nevertheless, this was a colorful bit of imagination that has now moved from CGI to the hobby shop shelves.

The Kit

AMT/ERTL has released this interesting - pre-finished die-cast metal and plastic 'kit' which is a colorful addition to your display shelf or desk.

The kit is packaged extremely well, so the likelihood of damage to your trifighter is slim.

The kit features three die-cast arms and a number of styrene fittings that magically come together without the use of any glue, only 21 screws. Yep, they even provide the screwdriver.

At the heart of this kit is a sphere that is mounted in a gimbal that allows the sphere to rotate. This gimbal is mounted during assembly into another gimbal, which, in turn, mounts into the spacecraft and can rotate as well. The result is a full three axis rotation of the sphere and its gimbals.

Step two of the instructions have you build one of the die-cast arms which takes six screws to complete. You don't realize until step three that you need to repeat step two three times to get all three arms ready for integration.

One thing the instructions neglect to mention that I was fortunate enough to get right the first time is that two of the arms have two mounting holes for the external missile launchers. These need to be positioned where the holes will be facing the bottom. Bottom during assembly is signified by the display stand mount installed in Step one. This will save you a little time if you bear that detail in mind.

Everything went together very smoothly, and assembly will take around 15-20 minutes with 21 screws to install and tighten. The finished model sits nicely on its display stand.

Conclusions

This is the coolest of the Star Wars die-cast kits released so far. In fact, I am going to be buying another one since my wife has taken this one for her desk. Definitely recommended.

My sincere thanks to RC2 for this review sample!