The Albatros from Arizona Models (www.arizonamodels.com) was an adventure.  I opened the box circa 2002 and found nothing but a pile of sticks, wing ribs and a set of blueprints.  I mean, I was horrified.  I called Jaime of Arizona Models to tell him he had left out the instruction manual.  What do you mean, there's no manual?  Eek.  Five-foot wingspan.  The Mercedes engine, Spandau machine guns and wheels were kits all by themselves.  That engine took weeks all by itself.  This is where I got serious.  But Jaime graciously walked me through the hard parts over the phone.  He's a believer in keeping WWI modeling alive, and a tremendous resource worldwide.  He has a fantastic selection if you are looking for something a little out of the ordinary and, uh, big.

While I was cruising the internet, my wife Rose spotted this color scheme (Jasta 18) and was quite smitten.  Me too.  Someone asked me if I planned to fly it.  Ha!  I recall reading the lament of one poor guy who spent a year building a plane, then crashed it on its maiden flight the morning of his wedding (I hope his marriage turned out better).  Note the rips in the wings.  I hadn't yet learned to work with fabric coverage, covered the whole thing with tissue.  And I had excessive faith in epoxy glue.  The result is that one day I heard a crash in the living room and found the Albatros on the floor with cracks in the fuselage and rips in the wings.  I had a choice.  I could either try to fix everything, or I could take my exacto knife and cut out more tissue, turning the rips into battle damage.  I went for the battle damage.

 I didn't know much about photography at the time, had my first digital camera, so the pictures weren't the best.  :>)  Since I've learned about things like lighting, and since I had a decent large background picture of an airfield that I had just used for the Gotha above, I reshot the main pictures.  Hope you like!

Note the picture below of the three dorky pieces of wood.  They get lodged in the fuselage and provide the upper placement for the lower wing.  I note them because figuring out how to place that lower wing was where I made the leap from building easy kits to the world of scratch-building.  I was pretty damn proud of those three sticks.  Still am.