For me, its sort of the opposite, my brothers, hell I'll be honest, my sister and my Mom too, are good with tools, my Dad is a tool maker, and my favorite grandpa was the classic handyman, up to and including, foundry work, machine work.  I just never seemed to have the visual memory for it.  My brother would astound me, sometimes, we would take something apart and get sidetracked and come back to it days, or weeks later and he'd start putting it back together.  I'd say, "how do you know that goes there?" He'd look at me like I was an idiot (I'm the OLDER brother, too) and say "you were there when we took it apart, that's where it was so let's put it back there." in a tone of voice only an adolescent can have who is getting a chance to lord it over his big brother.

For me it was probably a case of getting discouraged rather than not having the right influences.  And I suppose with all these people around who could do the stuff I never really worried too much about it.  It may be one of those things where I WISHED I could do something, but never worked hard enough at acquiring the basic skill set to actually set about the DOING.

The only advantage to beeing shorter than most, is that at some point all the population is or was your size, and they don't make stuff that just flat won't work for you (there are exceptions, if you are short enough I guess).  My friend who was 6'6 and got there early, just didn't fit into some things, especially 40 yrs ago, when that was truly exceptional height.

"I said, 'Wait a minute, Chester, You know I'm a peaceful man...'" Robbie Robertson