ctdahle

I finished a stable of 5 airplanes just before our first baby came in 2002. I got one more off the boards that year and haven't completed an airplane since. Kept flying pretty regularly for the first few years, but slowly the fleet succumbed to runway rash until I was down to just one flyable old Kadet, and it had a run in with a mesquite bramble in the fall of 2008. It's flyable, but embarrassingly tattered.

Both of my kids love to go out to the field, but they are bored after about 20 minutes. Happily, I am close enough to the field that it's not a big deal to run out, fly once or twice and come home again, but like you Juice, I had to give up my shop so the baby could have a bedroom.

Lack of shop space is the real killer. The dormant airplanes are hanging from the garage ceiling, but it's just not in the cards to undertake the A&P work that they all need. CA, epoxy, glow fuel, denatured alcohol, and all the other fluids, salves, unguents and emollients that model airplanes need are just not safe around little ones, nor is it really safe to leave a building project set up where little hands can reach.

So I am grounded, but I don't regret it any. My kids are fun, and eventually they will be old enough to understand how to safely thin epoxy with denatured alcohol and so on, and we will drag out an old Jetco Cessna 140 kit that I am saving and begin that process that starts with a box of sticks, continues by applying silkspan and dope, and ends with another little plane trundling through the air. The kids will giggle and run after it, and it all starts over.