> It's the price of the Kit Don't forget the price of your time. I "moonlight" as a computer system administrator for a small company about 3 miles from my house, keeping their server and computers running and backed up. They pay me $50 an hour for my time, which is about $33 an hour by the time Uncle Sam gets done with me. If you consider that I have 4100 hours into my KR so far, I already have over $135,000 in it, not counting material! Maybe that's not the way most people view it, but it's the way I look at it. Of course, really, Dana would say that I have to consider the value of money 9 years ago when I started, and my salary at my regular job back then, and average it all out, and he's right, but you get the picture. The time is worth a lot of money that I could have earned, if I'd wanted to spend more time at work rather than build an airplane.
Now if you're retired, and do it for the pleasure and to keep your mind sharp, that's a whole 'nuther story, assuming of course, that you finish the thing before you actually lose your medical. Don't get me wrong, I'm not begrudging this process at all, and am, in fact, enjoying the process, but I don't see the RV as being all that high priced when all things are considered. Like a lot of things in life, it's a tradeoff. I have to admit that when I started my KR, I didn't really think I could afford it, and now 9 years later, I'm already saving money for an RV-10 so I can haul the kids around. Like my father says, "people spend their money on whatever they want to spend it on". One of the things I do at work (and at home, on KRnet) is spend a lot of my time greasing the skids and making life easier for those that follow. That means I don't really get a lot done personally, but it does mean that I save a lot of other people's time. That gives me a lot of satisfaction, knowing that I turned a little of my time into saving a lot of time for others. It's kind of like multiplying my time by a large factor, which makes me feel worth a little more than I really am. That's exactly what Van is doing for RV builders, on a grand scale, and is why he's selling them like hotcakes... Mark Langford, Huntsville, AL N56ML "at" hiwaay.net see KR2S project at http://home.hiwaay.net/~langford
