Trev, sounds like we've got a lot in common -- I started playing Red Baron back in the 70's when it came out as an arcade game!. Is was just green wire-frame views on a black monitor and I thought it was the coolest thing on the planet. I don't even want to know how many quarters I pumped into those machines! Also years ago I scaled up some Guillow's plans for a Rumpler and THAT was going to be my NEXT GREATEST project. Never happened. Basically, my modeling came to an abrupt halt when I moved overseas although I did scratch-build a very small static Nieuport 11 in Kuwait just for something to do. I also bought one of those Hasegawa 1/8 museum scale DrI kits in Tokyo back when the yen was 21- to the dollar thinking that someday I'd be able to do it justice. Well 20 years later I realized that day would never come and so I finally sold it on eBay (for about 4 times what I paid for it) to a dedicated modeler in Germany and put the $500 into RC.

Building this model was a bit of a forced march motivated by my immenent return to Japan. I've spent the last three months of my sabbatical leave involved with this and now it's time to get back to REAL work, namely my Ph.D. thesis which is due to be submitted at the end of Sept. I've already got 300 or so pages in more or less final form (missing one final chapter) but it's still going to be a concerted push to finish in time. And of course, I'll be teaching again.

So all this means I won't have oodles of time for scale building. My next scale project (I can't believe I'm already thinking of a NEXT scale project) will likely be something that extends over several years -- a weekend project with more time spend flying than building. So many planes, so little time!

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