ORIGINAL: vertical grimmace
What did he use?
Some monocoat-type covering in white and orange! As far as I know, Ikeda-san has only just begun to build scale and this model is a huge advance in both scale and complexity as compared with his EIII (which also used white and orange monocoat). In one of the photos above you can see him in the yellow/green down jacket in the far right corner.
Again with the WW1, and climbing. I bet there was a rigging issue. Positive incidence in the wing.
The rigging is just elastic. But, if I understood him correctly, he said that mounted the wing at 2.5 degrees (whereas the original, he tells me, had 7 degrees). The model uses a fairly thick, slightly undercambered airfoil.
The total weight ready to fly was 1.3kg.