i see what you mean, george, if the kits are of the same quality of wnw perhaps 1/32 modellers would venture into this territory, its hard for me to judge as i have not laid eyes on copper state injection models, the original copper state when eric higte was of mixed quality, the masters were decent but many times the castings were misaligned and most small parts were unuseable,at least on most of my examples of the old csm. when they got new management and re-furbished the masters and did high quality resin casting inline with todays standards was a great improvement, now we have edgar who seems to be taking the company to the next level. to tell the truth i expected quality inline with newer eduard (oeffag albatros and ssw d.iii)and perhaps the gaspatch salmson for the new csm fk-8 and dolphin.which is very acceptable to me and surely most if not all 1/48 modellers.but i was just sounding off a note of caution because for one thing i would hate to see edgar spread himself too thin financially by putting out to many products at once and investing too much money for this small section of aircraft modelling. there is also something i have noticed recently where "some" of the newer modellers to enter into the WWI era of aviation modelling are mainly 1/32 wnw enthusists more so than actual WWI aircraft enthusists who enjoy modelling and i have heard criticism of kits that right before wnw were considered amazing and groundbreaking. i have seen comments aluding to the fact that they dont want to touch anything but wnw and also wishing for wnw to do new kits of already existing "nice" 1/32 kits. this has the effect of further pushing all the others out of 1/32 because they would not get a large portion of buisness.i think its a shame becausse to me modelling is art and art takes work. i do not wish to smear what gives another modeller happiness,if one is happy building oob wnw kits then by all means please do and be proud of your hobby. but i think in all of wnw glory there is something lost in the average build.yes there are many guys taking wnw kits up even further by scratchbuilding embellishments and am products. people like bo,george,bertl and des pop into my head although there are several other greats. to me in my opinion this is when its brought almost to the level of fine art. this is what i strive for, i enjoy 1/48 kits mainly because there are imperfections that i must research and correct, there are sometimes slight dimensional errors that are fun to make work as well as sanding and scraping and endeless hours under an optivisor adding those small extras that only someone who studies hard like you will notice. i have seen several wnw kits at shows and they usually look alike.what i mean is if you build an oob albatros d.v with scheme "a" it looks just like the other guy down the roads d.v scheme "a".not to sound like a broken record but this is all fine and power to every modeller but i personally am of the opinion that i enjoy seeing those builds that are obviously modified to the point where it is more an independant work of art than an assembled kit. i hope you guys get what i am trying (hopefully succesfully) to say. and i hope noone gets offended as i am just voicing how i see our little world. anyway if i were in the position of owning a company that produced ww1 aircraft i would be cautious about going against wnw.to my eye they have not only got the market cornered in 1/32 but the way they do it being the designer,producer and mrketer they have basically been wholesaling their product to us.this is why a roden albatros is $50 to $60 and wnw is $69. if wnw sold kits like every other company by selling their products to hannants and squadron the wnw albatros would be more like $100. just this mns somewhat educated opinion.
