I must confess that I never understood the attraction of scale warbirds. There are a lot of pretty homebuilts of all types available nowadays. If I was going to do this I would choose something with a proven track record & performance to match, like a Van's RV6 or RV8.
I'm not sure why I really want to build a scale warbird (or a full sized replica for that matter)...I just always have. Perhaps it combines my loves of both flight and a time of history that has always fascinated me. Projects like this, are never completely about practicability though. For example, its the same reason why I'm building a high performance car right now using a 40 year old car. For all intents and purposes, a modern car would be a better driver and would be just as fast. Yet, I still would rather have the vintage design. I think this is the same thing. The practical part of me says otherwise, but the rest of me would rather have something unique and interesting rather than build the "norm" homebuilts.
What really strikes me as ironic though (and kind of funny) right now is that its you Doug that doesn't understand this attraction. You see, when I was quite younger I learned about these homebuilt scale warbirds and thought it would be a really neat thing to do someday. Almost like having the real thing. I read into it a bit, but at the time I was much younger and the possibility was so far off in the distance it was unrealistic. Its still unrealistic, but now that I'm a bit older and I have a foreseeable future with the time and resources to undergo such a project...it is a good time for me to start researching these possibilities. When I was younger, I knew I wanted to do a Bf109 replica. But again, it was such an impossible idea, that over time it got pushed to the back of my mind and semi-forgotten, waiting for a day (like today) when I was older and could seriously begin looking at the idea. All I needed was a spark, something that stirred my interests to get the ball rolling. Here is the ironic part ;). You see, I was looking at your Bob Survivor photo thread and I saw that Bf109 that needed restoring. That same voice inside of me that loves restoring my old car was fascinated with that plane and thought it would be an awesome project. Unfortunately, the price for such an aircraft would likely be so high I could never hope to have the real thing. But, then I remembered those replica homebuilts I had read about years ago and I started reading about them again. It was then I decided that now was the time to begin researching that project. So, I suppose that I could say it was you who inspired me to finally begin researching homebuilts so I could one day build one.
