Who's building whom?

(December 2, 2006) -- After wasting some space here last week with some thoughts on the medical condition that keeps me from flying, I decided to continue a weekly "letter" to my RV family, with stuff that doesn't fit exactly into the RV Builder's Hotline format of aggregated news and tips. It's not exactly commentary, it's more musings on the "human side" of building an airplane.

Every now and again, I think about doing more writing and try to get an occasional aviation article published, mostly because writing is about all I know how to do. But every time I escape to a cabin in northern Vermont to squirrel myself away with a laptop and some ideas, I think "this is too hard." Writing when you have to isn't much fun; writing when you want to far more personally entertaining, even if it doesn't put food on the table. Besides, I find people enjoy my writing better if they don't have to pay for it. So I'm hoping you'll at least get your money's worth each week.

This is actually being written the Saturday evening after the last Hotline went out, and during the day here in Minnesota, the temperature has gone from 21 this morning to 18 now, just a week after it was 65 degrees. I'm reminded of Ken Scott's article a few years ago in RVator about Oshkosh that paid homage to the people who live in these parts and their ability to put up with extremes. And earlier this week, I chuckled at a comment Doug Reeves made about the northern climate after some snow fell on Dallas.

Truth is, this is my favorite time of the year to fly. Minnesota becomes the "land of 10,000 emergency runways" and the air is stable and dense -- perfect for take-off-and-look-down pilots like me.

We don't have any snow here in flyover country right yet, but I imagine it'll be along soon enough. But cold weather? We've got plenty to share.

Which makes RV building in the hangar (aka: my garage) problematic. I've got a little "Buddy Heater" to warm up frozen hands but for the most part, working on the airplane in this weather is like taking the temperature readings atop Mount Washington. And yet, work on it, I must. It's the weekend and after 5 1/2 years of building, I'm a mere salmon trying to swim upstream for no other known reason other than it's what I think I'm supposed to do.

Last weekend I finished up some interior painting, knowing that even at the warm temperatures at the time, I was likely looking at my last chance to paint until spring. I didn't get most of it done, but I got enough of it completed. The fuselage -- at least from the fuselage kit perspective -- is about completed and the finishing kit is spread out in parts that take up the entire bedroom -- err, former bedroom since he moved out in July -- of my youngest son. My wife wants to use the room for an office, so something's going to have to happen soon to make those parts one big one out in the garage.

But work stopped on the RV this week. On my way to work on Monday, I hit the garage door opener and the thing made some noises and didn't close. It was the end of the line for ye olde garage door opener. Off to Sears for a new one.

Now, you probably know that a garage door opener is not the second coming of the space shuttle. But for me, it did present a somewhat daunting task. I don't come from a long line of construction specialists (you may have read this entry in my blog, "Stirrings from the Empty Nest"), and a big box with lots of parts, I found, can still give me the shakes the way having to ask a girl to the Thanksgiving Dance in high school did.

But sometimes it's only momentary now. Until I tell myself, "If you can build and airplane, you can put a stinkin' garage door opener in." OK, I admit, I haven't built an airplane yet. I've built part of an airplane. Close enough.

So I tackled the project in the 13 degree temps of the garage over two nights, and I found myself doing something else that was, at one time, completely uncharacteristic of me: I found myself saying, "that guy who put the old garage door opener in could've done a better job if he'd just done this and that." And so I did "this and that" this time, even if it was cold, and even if it added time to the task.

There was a time when I was growing up that my family called me "the Scotch tape" kid, for my willingness to cut corners and solve most every problem with a roll of tape. So what if it was a short-term fix; it was a fix.

Ironic (or at least coincidental) , then, that I now live in the shadow of 3M's world headquarters.

I credit my RV project for killing the Scotch Tape kid. And in his place is someone with more confidence to tackle projects, and do them right -- or at least better than I might've done years ago.

It's times like this that I realize that I'm not just building an RV airplane. My RV airplane is building me too.

-- Bob Collins