Cool Neighbor

I finally mustered the courage to stop by a neighbor's sizeable workshop and introduce myself after fifteen years of thinking about it... He is a semi-retired body man who teaches paint and bodywork at the local community college. He also restores old Buicks. He likes old motorcycles. He is renting space to another person who is building a replica of a 1924 airplane powered by a Henderson 4-cylinder motorcycle engine. (Yes, he intends to use a Henderson engine, and and has already rebuilt one). That person needs help to calculate the center of lift for his Gottingen 385 airfoil.

The body man is about to finish modifications to a state of the art downdraft paint booth (available for rent), and also has a full complement of tools like an industrial size English wheel, a bead blast cabinet, a 6 ft lathe, welders, etc.

Only in my wildest daydream could I imagine a place where I could exchange aeronautical engineering services for access to tools and an experienced body man.

Oh, yeah, the final interesting coincidence... He showed me an unbelievably rare 1915 Scripps-Booth awaiting restoration. It was nagging at me why the Scripps-Booth name was so familiar... My great uncle Bob worked at the Scripps-Booth dealership in Portland, OR, during this period, and I have a photograph of the dealership. Sometimes it's weird how things are connected...