Steve,

Unfortunately, there are no shops I'm aware of (and I'm a Ford/Visteon lifer ) near Dearborn any more. Joe's had a good one on Wyoming which they closed a few years back, consolidating it with their Farmington store previously mentioned.

Getting to any of the mentioned stores is a 1/2 hour to 1.5 hour proposition, depending on the time of day and the day of the week. This is also compounded by the ungodly amount of road construction going on in the Detroit area right now. Note that after 7pm the traffic situation goes away, but most of these places close by 8pm so that doesn't help much. The weekend is usually no problem, if you're still here then.

The nearest one is the Taylor Rider's, which is about 25-30 minutes from the Ford WHQ (kinda the epicenter of Dearborn), but watch out for the I-75 construction. The best one in the area that I know of is undoubtedly Prop Shop, but that's one heck of a drive on a week day due to the above cited problems. Joe's is probably the second best (my LHS), and the least construction problems, but could be a 1 hour+ drive on Friday afternoon just due to traffic.

There's also another Riders at 42011 Ford Road in Canton, which has a moderate sized R/C section and lots of friendly folk. It's probably the second closest to Dearborn, and possibly the fastest to get to.

I believe there are a couple of other smaller multi-hobby shops down river, but there names escape me at the moment and I don't think they're worth the special trip in any case.

If you haven't planned on it, you might want to make time to see Greenfield Village/Henry Ford Museum (now collectively known as "The Henry Ford"), which has a sizable aircraft collection along with an incredible number of interesting historical items to see. Be warned though, you can easily blow a couple of days there if you're historically inclined.

If you have email access next week, give me a yell and maybe I can hook up with you to show you the sights.