On 14 Aug 2003 17:48:02 -0700, (Lou Parker) wrote:

I'm building a wood and fabric plane and would have loved to talk to
others about their planes but there were none to be found. I looked
for manufacturers of wooden kits but only Fisher had the gonads to
show their product.
If the wood kits are as good as we are led to believe, why don?t they
show us what they have to offer?

Cost, most likely. We had a recent post that a small booth in the
swap-meet area was about $1500, and a small display booth inside the
hangars was over $2000. I don't know how much an outdoor display spot is,
but suspect it's over two grand, as well. Add in the expense of
transporting your wares and people, finding housing for your employees,
etc.

Kit-wise, the vast majority of the wood designs are small Mini-Max class
airplanes. Not much profit on each of them. Wood kits are getting rarer;
people want a lot of prefabbed parts, and that means a lot of expensive
hand-work for a wood kit.

There still are a number of wood plans-built designs out there, but how
many sets of $65 Fly Baby plans do you have to sell to be able to afford a
booth at Oshkosh?

It's just a sad truth that Oshkosh isn't affordable for the purveyors of
the small plans-built aircraft that got EAA started. The Broadhead
Pietenpol Fly-In usually happens a week earlier than Oshkosh, and it's
located in Wisconsin just like Oshkosh is. Yet you'll see dozens of Piets
at Broadhead, compared to a couple at Airventure.

Ron Wanttaja