My friend Don Dubois told me when I first started having kids, "It's not about quality time, it's about quantity of time". I try to spend as much time with my kids as I can, even when it would be easier to do a job by myself. Last night my youngest son wanted to help me work on the trailer, so out to the trailer we went. Our job was to drill out some rivets holding the inner skin on, so we got to it. After helping Josh drill the first 5 rivets or so, I let him go at it. He was able to get almost all of them himself, and we had a great time. What I thought would be slow going turned out to be a great discovery: my son has great mechanical intuition and sympathy. He never forced the drill, if a rivet started to spin on the drill he figured out what to do, and he never got frustrated. Not bad for a kid! Notice the iPod player near Josh's feet: We listen to The VAP while we work.
I'll take care of the higher rivets
If you look closely, you can see a black line drawn down along the wall between the windows. I'll cut the aluminum sheet here with my shears. When I put it back I'll patch it together with a strip of aluminum so that it all looks almost factory installed. I am doing it like this because I'm only doing the back half of the trailer, but this sheet runs nearly the entire length.
My friend Don Dubois told me when I first started having kids, "It's not about quality time, it's about quantity of time". I try to spend as much time with my kids as I can, even when it would be easier to do a job by myself. Last night my youngest son wanted to help me work on the trailer, so out to the trailer we went. Our job was to drill out some rivets holding the inner skin on, so we got to it. After helping Josh drill the first 5 rivets or so, I let him go at it. He was able to get almost all of them himself, and we had a great time. What I thought would be slow going turned out to be a great discovery: my son has great mechanical intuition and sympathy. He never forced the drill, if a rivet started to spin on the drill he figured out what to do, and he never got frustrated. Not bad for a kid! Notice the iPod player near Josh's feet: We listen to The VAP while we work.
I'll take care of the higher rivets
If you look closely, you can see a black line drawn down along the wall between the windows. I'll cut the aluminum sheet here with my shears. When I put it back I'll patch it together with a strip of aluminum so that it all looks almost factory installed. I am doing it like this because I'm only doing the back half of the trailer, but this sheet runs nearly the entire length.
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2 comments:
John, I am impressed with how you have gotten the family involved. You are very lucky the kids take interest. Ava looks at me with the the "right, in your wildest dreams am I getting all the black stuff on me" every time I try and get here to help me with the polishing. Do you think your boy would like to come to airstream camp this summer at my house. He will be an expert polisher when I return him and he will never be so glad to see you. Get back to me, let me know.
I asked Josh if he was interested, and he said no way. He heard some guy on the VAP say that polishing sucks.
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