Q-talk 130 - Just 15 Minutes A Day...
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- Category: Q-Talk Articles
- Published: Wednesday, 23 December 2009 16:24
- Written by Dan Yager
- Hits: 3305
One builder's way to make progress on his project.
I may be one of the select few that are happy to see gas prices so high this summer, and I'm not even a "Big Oil" executive! High gas prices have given me an excuse to stay home for vacation and work on my airplane, instead of visiting Aunt Agnes! (Trust me; you'd be happy about gas prices too.) At any rate, I know a lot of guys, like me, who bought a "90% completed" or "previously flying" Q off the internet, and when they got that "almost finished" bird home, it suddenly struck them how daunting a task rebuilding and repairing a composite airplane can be. I feel your pain, and even though the great people in the Quickie Builders group have been providing me with lots of encouragement, I've found it very difficult to just get started working on my plane. It's not that I'm lazy, it's just that I've been letting life get in the way a little too much. So my little project has been sitting in the garage for two years looking almost exactly like it did when I pulled it off the trailer for the first time.
Well, that's got to change. I recently realized that I have no one to blame but myself. So, I decided to make my airplane, and therefore, my website about my plane a higher priority. I've discovered just how much a small shift in thinking can accomplish.
Over the last few weeks I have been consistently spending just fifteen minutes per evening sanding off all of the old paint that's on my "previously flying" project, and the results have been encouraging.
In fact, "fifteen minutes' often turns into a longer session when I get "in the groove" and my wife isn't calling me in for dinner. If you think about it, fifteen minutes per evening, has resulted in several hours a week being spent on my plane. Several hours a week, in turn, will result in several hundred hours a year and that can render huge dividends, bringing you much closer to having a "currently flying project" instead of the basket case sitting in your garage. In hindsight, I realize that if I had started the fifteen minutes a night thing two years ago, I might be flying my plane now instead of still talking about it.
The same is true of my website at www.quickheads.com, I've decided to put a little bit of effort into it every day. My background is in multimedia, and graphic design, so I actually enjoy sitting in front of a computer and reformatting all of the Quickie related stuff I've accumulated over the years and putting it on the web. The problem again is that I have A LOT of material to sort through, so looking at the entire project has seemed a little overwhelming.
Again I recently came to the conclusion that time is going to pass, I might as well have something to show for it on the other side. So I've begun to hunker down and tackle little projects that I've had in mind for my website, and again the results have been encouraging.
My goal is to make my website a place that the community can use to help build their own planes. To that end, I took the over 100 pages of the Q-2 plans, scanned them in to the computer and made web pages out of them, by reformatting the pictures and re-typing all of the text. This one element of my site took me about a year to accomplish but the plans are now online for everyone to use, for free. The big advantage in having them on the web is that the text is now fully searchable. So, if you need to know what kind of AN bolts are used to hold the tail cone on, you can simply type "trailerable" into my site's search engine, and find the answer instantly.
If you've visited the site recently, you'll also notice that I've begun doing the same thing with the Q-1 plans. I have them about 1/3 of the way done, and have had success trying to upload between 2-4 pages per weekday. So stay tuned.
I've also been working with Mike Huffman of Quickie Dealership fame and he has provided me with a wealth of information about "Free Enterprise" and photos from Cowley Plastics, Revmaster, and the other QAC vendors. All of this stuff will be getting uploaded to my website as I continue to chip away at the pile of papers on my desk.
In addition, I've been uploading the 4 hour video from Clio Crop Care that shows the construction of the Q-2 and Q-200 from start to finish including several hiccups along the way. The footage is a little cheesy, but the content is pretty amazing.
Finally, I've opened an online store, and I'll be posting good quality versions of the large template appendix sheets as well as other "downloadable" products to help put my graphic design skills to good use. Slowly, but surely I'll keep adding new products that I think might help everyone out, and I encourage your feedback. I guess what I'm trying to say, is that it doesn't matter how many times the guys on the Q-list have told me to just do a small project every evening until I'm done. Actually overcoming my own zero momentum has required the most work so far. We all need to do a lot less dreaming and a lot more doing, even if it's just fifteen minutes per day.
Make your project a priority. Good luck and happy building.
Submitted by Dan Yager Kingston PA
Look at this month's classifieds on page 11 for Dan's Quickie products he has for sale at reasonable rates.
You can order a printed copy of Q-talk #130 by using the Q-talk Back Issue Order Page.