On Tuesday, January 12, 2021 at 4:35:53 PM UTC-5, wrote:
On Tuesday, January 12, 2021 at 2:10:20 PM UTC-7, Martin Gregorie wrote:
On Tue, 12 Jan 2021 11:53:17 -0800, John Foster wrote:

Sorry for the long-winded reply. Just venting some of my frustrations..


I'm completely sympathetic to that dilemma. I'm doing something about it in my club. Over the last 10 years we've upgraded from an all Schweizer-Iron to a "modern" (aka only 40 years old designs) fleet. We have a 2-33, three 1-26s, a 1-34, Pilatus, Grob Twin Astir, LS4, and LS3. Several of those ships came through club member donations. All of the last 3 were basket cases that we bought cheap or were donated. Weand spent hundreds of hours refinishing. Today, we have a reasonable fleet (by US standards at least). I have over 400 hours in personally on the refinish projects, and our total club effort is north of 1500 hours.

Anyway, not to contribute further to thread drift, but the solution is there in the form of going back to the way clubs were built in the last generation. Read Kai Gertsen's book sometime.