Postby David Jones » February 25th, 2013, 11:22 am
Ah Paul, I know exactly where you're coming from. My term for it is "balsered out". I'm retired now and the main interests in my life are model aircraft and golf. This time of year is definately building weather, as you know I'm in the middle of my Ziroli DC3. I started it at the begining of October and the airframe is now finished and ready for covering. Thats because I've been averaging five hours a day in the garage. Sometimes this can be too much of a good thing because the "hobby" becomes more like a job.
I'm fortunate that I have a small band of good mates and, over the years we've talked about doing some kind of joint project. Alan Greaves bit the bullit and bought a Ziroli B25 kit. I built the airframe, he glass clothed and painted it, Alan Cantwell did some engineering for it and Mike Whitehead made up a wiring loom for the radio installation. Although it's Alan's model, we've all had some input to varying degrees and I've found this maintains the enthusiasm throughout the project.
Because the rest of the lads still work full time, and don't have much time to build, I've become the unofficial builder for our group, and the others contribute thier own specialities so, in effect, all our builds now are "joint efforts". This may not suit everybody, but it certainly works for us. Joining the LMA and getting to meet other members who are more experienced with large models has certainly expanded our pool of knowledge and injected a sense of "What shall we build next" attitude.
I'll leave you with one final thought. I packed the hobby in a few years ago, mainly because of the reasons you've pointed out, but I still kept in touch with the lads. I think the main reason I came back to it was because of a comment that was made to me by a dear, now departed, friend who said, "Jonesey, the hobby is there to serve you, not the other way round. If you get fed up, walk away for a day or two, do something else and come back to it ready to go" His picture is pinned on the wall above my work bench and there's many a time I'll look up at it and say, "How am I doing Phil?"
I hope this little input is of some use to you and might go some way to help restore the urge to crack on. It can be difficult, espescailly with a large project like your DC3, I'm sure we are not on our own and that even the most prolific of builders must say at some point, "I can't be bothered today" and walk away. Dave Jones.
