Category:Tri-ang water-going ships and boats

Tri-Ang produced a range of plastic-bodied boats in the 1940s under the Penguin sub-brand (Penguin being in possession of a plastic injection moulding machine).

Branding for the plastic boats and ships

The Tri-ang boat range was the classic example of Lines Brothers' enthusiasm for branding. Some of the boats might be variously branded as:

• Lines Brothers (the company),
• Tri-ang (the company's main marque),
• International Model Aircraft or IMA (a manufacturing group/factory within Lines Brothers),
• FROG ( IMA's main brand-name for flying model aircraft, for "Flies Right Off Ground"), or
• Penguin, the sub-sub-sub-brand for FROG model aircraft that didn't actually fly (as a penguin was a non-flying bird).

Since this boat was manufactured by IMA, and didn't fly, it was a "FROG Penguin" - perhaps with the rather strained retrospective logic that although penguins couldn't fly, they could swim.

In Tri-ang's latter years, this cascading and confusing range of potential brandnames was downplayed in favour of a new brandname for the whole range: Scalex Boats.

Various models were packaged or advertised under various multiple combinations of these brandnames, and some of the longer-lived Triang boat products have probably at one time or another used almost all of them.

Yachts

• k Yachts (a range of steel-bodied boats that Lines Brothers took over),