RE: Club Members insist on flying solo...
We are prettyy much the same as DrDeath.
There is the "standard" day group that is out during the day, mainly the retired folk and people that work 3rd or second shifts, and then there is the standard "evening" group that is those of us that work during the day.
There is quite a bit more people during the day than the evening and I have been there with 7 -10 planes in the air and a select few not paying attention to the pattern in effect at the time which causes allot of problems, then there are the guys during the day that wait for "certain" people to land until they will fly.
The evening people like me have an unspoken rule we follow, we take turns but if someone is in a hurry we do not mind more than one plane in the air and we tend to stay in our own little airspace for seperation and communicate our intentions if/when we need to intrude on the other persons airspace. There are also times when we all go up just to chase each other around, usually with our foamies. If there are foamies up we will have more than one gas/gloe plane in the air and the guys flying in close will gladly get away from the runway if you just let them know ahead of time you are landing.
Now in my eyes the pattern guys need to learn to practice with other aircraft in the air. I fly IMAC and have been to a few contests where there is more than one aircraft in the air running through a given sequence. Granted I'm the only one at our club that flies IMAC and the others like to watch me fly and I encourage it and appreciate when they give me the airspace plus they usually will help critique my maneuvers or video tape the sequences for me. During the summer it's easy to get the airspace to myself at times but now since the time change and lack of daylight after work I'm limited to the weekends and we cannot start flying until 9:00am on Saturday and noon on Sunday do to neighbor concerns so right now even asking for the airspace alone is pretty much out of the question.
In your case I think you all need to talk about it and work out something that's good for everyone