Every year about this time of the year I start calling around to all the bigger companies as we're getting ready for our Toledo coverage. Hobbico, Sig, Horizon, Balsa USA, Aeroworks, Dubro, and many others. I basically give them a call in order to get a feel for any new products they are going to have at the show, and to see if there is anything special we need to plan for when we do our coverage. I usually spend quite some time with them on the phone as it usually turns into a chat session. I'm friends with a lot of these people and it's good to get to talk to them.

Anyway, back to the subject at hand. As I talked to the reps from Sig (about a week or two ago) the overall attitude was very positive. They had a very good "vibe" going and were very positive about where Sig was going. Does the attitude mean anything? You bet. This time last year they were all worried about the state of things. This year they are positive. I take that as a good sign.

I learn something all the time, and I picked up an interesting bit of info that I didn't know when I was talking to them. We got to talking about the balsa supply and availability of wood around the world. The world basically breaks down to 2 major sources of wood, Indonesia and Guatemala. All the wood going to Asia and that part of the world comes out of Indonesia and all the wood going to our part of the wood comes from Guatemala. They said that they can get wood from Indonesia but the shipping costs are prohibitive. Also learned that there is so much balsa wood available in Columbia that there wouldn't be any shortage if we could get wood out of there. And they can get the wood, but by the time they finished paying all the drug lords to get it out it would be even more expensive than anything else in the world. Though that was interesting.

Ken