‘Extreme hobbyist’ beats boredom
Enthusiast puts thousands of hours into giant models
With little else to do while the COVID-19 pandemic puts much of the world on pause, Bob Griffin has found himself spending hours upon hours doing what he loves best: building models.
In a room in his Regina basement, Griffin can often be found leaning over the pieces of a model, carefully sanding plastic edges and fitting in brass finishings, painting intricate details or peering through a magnifying glass while setting tiny pieces in their proper places.
These are not just any models. These are giant models — ranging from four-and-a-half to five feet in length — that Griffin describes as “museum quality” once completed. The kits come with thousands of pieces and take him between 1,000 to 2,000 hours to complete, depending on the model.
His love of building models began when he was around eight years old and his father gave him a small model. As he grew up, his father continued to encourage his love of models and every now and then would get him a new model car or truck.
Even after graduating high school and entering adult life, Griffin’s childhood love of the hobby stayed with him. As the years passed, the models he chose to build only became increasingly elaborate. By the 1980s, he had upgraded to giant scale models of historical ships and airplanes.
Through much of his 28-year career working at SGI, Griffin found that building models was one thing that never failed to help him leave the stress of work behind.
“Outside of physical exercise, that was the one stress reliever that I have,” Griffin said in a recent phone interview.
“That’s all this hobby is to me, just a way for me to get away from the world.”
Then, in 2000, Griffin and his wife ventured seriously into winemaking, which took up a lot of time and space. Griffin decided to put his models on the shelf for a time to focus on making wine.
Fifteen years came and went, but when his wife passed away in 2015, Griffin reduced his winemaking operations and his thoughts once again turned back to his models. He had also retired in 2009 and needed something to keep his mind busy.
His basement needed to be renovated anyway, so Griffin figured he would build a special room where he could work on and display his creations. He spent the next two years crafting the special room, which now includes custom shelving where he can display his finished models under plexiglass and directional spotlights to highlight his creations.
In 2018, with his hobby room completed, Griffin dove back into building models.
In total, the now 64-year-old has more than 20 of these giant models, with the average cost of each sitting between $500 and $700. And that price is just for the basic kit. Griffin also buys brass upgrade kits, switching out many of the smaller plastic pieces — like doors, railings, canons and propellers — for tiny, hand-tooled brass replicas. Paint supplies are also an extra cost.
“This hobby is not a kid’s hobby,” he said. “I would call (myself) an extreme hobbyist.”
In fact, Griffin believes he is one of only a handful of people in Western Canada to have such a large collection of the giant models.
It’s not always easy for him to get his hands on a specific model, but a long-standing relationship with Wade Nyirfa has helped him out with that. Nyirfa owns Redline Hobby in Regina, which is where Griffin gets the majority of his models and paint supplies.
It took Griffin two years of searching high and low before he could find a large, high quality scale model of the Avro Lancaster, a bomber plane used in the Second World War.
Nyirfa knew Griffin was looking for one and had spread the word among his suppliers.
“I was one of the few guys in Western Canada that was looking for an Avro Lancaster,” said Griffin.
“The supplier called him and said, ‘Is your friend still collecting?’ ... It was one of the first that hit Canada.”
While Griffin typically enjoys building ships over airplanes, the Avro Lancaster holds special meaning to him. His father served in the Second World War, and Griffin said there is a chance his father worked on the Avro Lancaster as a flight technician in England during that time.
“That’s one of the reasons why I’ve got the Avro Lancaster, as kind of a memory to my father,” he said.
Two of Griffin’s finished models sit on display at Redline Hobby and Nyirfa said a number of customers have bought kits for the larger models after seeing his work.
“(They are) amazed at the detail and how neat it is, really. To look at something like that and know he’s created that,” said Nyirfa of how customers react when they see Griffin’s handiwork.
Now with the COVID-19 pandemic preventing Griffin from doing the other activities he enjoys — like going to the gym and meeting up with friends — he has even more time on his hands to pour into building models.
“The advent of COVID-19 just gave me more of an excuse to put more time in on my models,” he said. “This is what I do to get through.”
Now he’s putting in as many as eight to 10 hours a day in his basement, usually working away on two different models at once. If he gets frustrated with one or just needs some variety, he switches to the other model.
Over the years, Griffin said building such intricate models has taught him about attention to detail and patience. Even though he can quickly lose patience with other projects, he finds he never walks away from his models. In fact, he often loses track of time completely while caught up in the process.
“It’s a hobby that I love more than anything in the world,” he said.
“If anybody’s interested and they used to do it as a kid, it’ll give you back a lot of what you lost and thought you lost. It’s just a way to relax and ... be yourself.”