I’ll Get a Real Job Tomorrow!
A missive from across the decades about the decidedly mixed blessing of being an RC glider manufacturer.
From the constant flurry of new and eager entrants, you know that the glider kit manufacturing business is a great business to get into. The joys of seeing your designs fill the contest skies and even win a contest now and then has got to be a real hoot. Being able to be a modeler full time, to talk gliders all day long and not have to go to work is every glider flier’s dream.
This dream has been my life for twenty years now. As far as I know, I am the sole (glider kit only) manufacturer who has been able to sustain this dream for more than a few years. The others enter the field with the dream fresh and the enthusiasm high only to fade away, with a few of their creations dustily hiding in forgotten closets as the only clue that a dream once lived, soared with the eagles and died. The few glider kit manufacturers who survive, branch out into other, more lucrative phases of the hobby. They switch over to the manufacture or marketing of power kits, electrics, helicopters, adhesives or radio gear where the profit margins are more reasonable and where the potential market is much larger.
What are the problems and frustrations with this seemingly idyllic dream that can turn it into a nightmare? Why is it that a long-time veteran like myself would even consider leaving it all behind and getting a real job? Am I crazy or what? How can such a dream-come-true be anything but a constant rush and the ultimate in self-actualization?
Like, in many fields, actual performance and innovation are not what drives the market. What drives the market is the perception, not the reality. People want to fly the gliders that are perceived as the top performers and big contest winners. Unfortunately, the gliders that are the highly publicized contest winners are the gliders that are being flown by a few of the highly publicized, top flyers of the day and thus they garner undue coverage in the model press. This has been the order of the day for as long as I can remember.
For example, in 1972 and 1973, the rage was Mark Models Windfree. It was a simple two channel, straight-winged, built-up glider. Mark Smith’s flying made the glider look unbeatable. In reality, the TODI was a truly innovative glider with a better airfoil (E-387), the mother of our modern day control systems and a fiberglass pod fuselage. In parts of the country where the two gliders were both flown by good pilots, the TODI was clearly superior. Not so in the pages of RCM where Preston Estep Junior’s soaring column made the Windfree sound like the design breakthrough of the age. The next great rage was the Wind Drifter followed by a long string of other break-through polyhedral kits — and finally, the present-day tips eclectic polyhedral-revival-design has joyfully taken soaring journalism to a new level of bliss!
One of the benefits of having been in the hobby as long as I have is that it gives me a unique (if slightly jaded) sense of perspective. It is easier to see the big picture. While in the beginning of my career, I was easily outraged by what I perceived as injustices, bias and just plain asinine and incompetent reporting in the model press. I was pleased to see that I have mellowed to the point where last year when an inane rave review came out and headlined that a pathetically documented tips-up polyhedral retread was the ‘ultimate glider kit’, I hardly even lost sleep!
Possibly one reason for the constant flow of hopeful new entrants to the glider kit market is that it may be too easy to get into the glider kitting business. There are no enforceable kit completeness, quality or performance standards. In fact, anyone can design a relatively good glider if they do not depart too far from the specifications and structural systems of other successful glider designs. This is particularly true now that glider controls have been standardized and are no longer part of the kit. Now, most of the high-performance kits simply have the controls being handled electronically by computer enhanced transmitters.
If you are a good contest flyer and local hero it makes things even easier because you can claim that your design dominates the competition in your area. You then send out press releases to all the magazines with photos and creative verbiage. With luck, your design will be plastered around in every soaring column sounding like the greatest performance breakthrough of all time. This is heady stuff. You are featured right up there amongst the greats of soaring, whom you have only read about before.
Magically, the orders start to roll in. Now is the time that you find out whether or not you can actually produce kits! The people at the magazines simply publish what you send them, as an item of interest to the readers. That is unless you are able to press a hot-button and get them to do creative journalism including enthusiastic speculation as to their performance expectations for your kit. Whether or not you have what it takes to deliver the goods is another matter.
Simply doing proper plans and building instructions is a monumental task that in the past would have been considered an absolute necessity. This truism has gone by the wayside recently, however, as the aforementioned tips up kit was born to market on the raves and accolades of an orgiastically enthused model press. The kit had very sketchy plans and no building instructions at all! There has been no hint of these and other similar kit deficiencies in any of the magazine reviews or in any of the miles of soaring column coverage, written to enlighten the unwary soaring public. It would appear that these trivial deficiencies are obviously of no consequence anymore. Perhaps we, in the business, have been spending too much time on such mundane matters in the past.
Once the plans are complete, the production molds are built and the jigs and templates are ready to go, the first kit rolls out the door. This is indeed a day of jubilation. Soon, however, the true cost of doing business starts to hit home. This includes the cost of boxes, plywood, balsa, fiberglass, carbon fiber and all the many hardware items, not to mention the costs associated with publicity.
To make matters worse, you begin to find, that your production efficiency is down due to divided demands on your time. One of the more enjoyable aspects of making glider kits is talking to glider flyers around the country who call you. Unfortunately, while you are spending several hours every day handling the phone, no production is being done on your orders so you are not making any money. Oh to have been paid a dollar an hour for all the thousands of hours I have spent on the phone!
Best of all, you find that you are besieged by calls from around the country by people who want to help you out. Some of these philanthropists want free kits for writing a kit review that they think they can get published in a magazine (very few of these reviews seem to get published, however). Everyone knows that one way to sell kits in an area is to have the top flyers in the area flying your kits. You get dozens of letters and calls from flyers asserting that they dictate the market in their given areas and for the meager price of a free kit or hefty discount they will direct the local rabble to your product. Then there are the endless contest gift solicitations to flood into your office.
A related phenomenon that you are bound to experience is that you will find many of your customers to be people of considerable wealth. Many of these benefactors of the American Dream think nothing of charging up to $150 per hour or more for their time and yet they can’t stand to see you make over $5 an hour for your time on the kit you sell them. In the end, if you give in to many helpful promotional giveaways and good-guy discounts you will be hopelessly in debt and out of business before you even get started.
On one hand, if you keep your expenses to an absolute minimum, do most of the work yourself, keep your designs current, work out of your garage and are willing to give up on having any free time, you can eke out a near-poverty-level-living long-term in the business. On the other hand, if you hire people to do the work, rent manufacturing space and travel around to the major soaring events in the country to take your bows, you had better have another source of wealth or you will be broke and out of business in two or three years or less.
Like tin soldiers, I have seen a constant flood of new glider manufacturing companies emerge and walk across the killing fields of this brutal hobby only to fall silent and be forgotten within a short time. Though I am a participant, I cannot remember most of the names. They were names like Mark Models, T&H Enterprises, CraftAir, Southwest Models, Nelson Models, Hobie, Superior Flying Models and Flightglass Laminates.
Naturally, if you work out of your house you have the problem of the phone (unless you divert needed cash to pay for a separate business line). People will call you at all hours of day and night and be totally surprised if you are not eager to chat with them. “Oh, have I caught you at a bad time?” is the understated phrase you hear just after you have stumbled out of the shower with soap in your eyes at 10:00 PM to talk long distance to a cheery modeler. I have received business calls at 3:00 AM! For a while, I resorted to an answering machine after my 5:00 PM business hours but this was a hardship on my family in receiving personal calls.
Eventually you begin to realize that you have created a monster that you can’t control. Even going to the flying field becomes a chore. Everyone is laying in wait for you to show up so they can tell you about a mistake they found in a kit or a better idea that they are sure they are the first person in the world to have thought of. Perhaps they just want you to remember to hand-deliver some two-bit kit part to the field so they can save the shipping charge. Rather than enjoying the spontaneous, relaxing and exhilarating sport of soaring you find that you have to defend your design philosophy and be harangued by complaints and better ideas, every time you put in an appearance. Forget going to contests and being able to concentrate on your flying!
About 10 years ago I was at a major contest where Lee Renaud of Airtronics was present. One disgruntled modeler came up to me and said I can’t believe it, I wanted to talk to Lee Renaud about ordering a part for my Sagitta and he just told me to call him at the office on Monday during business hours! I’m glad you’re not like that! I chuckled to myself when I heard the story because I knew that Lee had it figured out much better than I did. It is a real shock to discover that you can no longer use your hobby to get away from your work.
You may now logically ask me why I am still in the glider kitting business if I believe that the pay is poor, the work hours are long and if I cannot escape my work, even by going flying? I ask myself that same question several times a week. No, I do not have a divine calling to kit gliders like Mel Culpeper, who according to his writing is kitting for Jesus. More mundanely for me, the pluses (so far) outweigh the minuses. It is the simple things. I like the people who soar. I like their diversity. And yes, I do enjoy the notoriety of being a kit designer. Most of all, however, I have not found any other job that utilizes my weird assortment of abilities as well as kit design and manufacturing. Though my degree is in Architecture, I always felt like a misfit in that field. With Dodgson Designs, the computer plays a big role in my job satisfaction. I rely on it for doing glider design analyses, for writing and desk-top publishing the building instructions, catalogs, etc. as well as producing the CAD generated drawings. You see, my job would be just great if someone else actually did the nitty gritty work of manufacturing, invoicing and shipping the kits — and if the glider kitting business was more lucrative. On the other hand, I probably won’t go looking for a real job tomorrow! There are still more glider kits for me to design in the next few years — I can’t give it up yet!
©1992, 2021 Bob Dodgson
All photos and drawings are by the author. Read the next article in this issue, return to the previous article in this issue or go to the table of contents. A PDF version of this article, or the entire issue, is available upon request.
