Masterpieces on Display

John Geigle Owner of Masterpiece Models

Models sit on a table at Masterpiece Models. (Zachary Kaufman/The Columbian)

John Geigle started his career as a professional model builder in 1982. He just didn’t realize it until 10 years later.

Geigle had stopped by Vancouver’s Pearson Air Museum in 1992 to donate some of his models, but Gary Thompson, the Pearson Airpark Historical Society’s executive director, did him one better. He briefly admired Geigle’s models, excused himself and came back with a check.

“He bought them, then asked me: ‘Can you do more?’”

Within three years, Geigle had turned his boyhood hobby into a full-time business — Masterpiece Models — that now employs nine people at its Northeast St. Johns Road location and has a client list that includes the Department of Defense. Its products are on display around the world.

It didn’t start that way. Geigle had owned Jardino’s Auto and Truck and at one point was running Handyman Service while building models on the side before selling off parts of the handyman business and creating Masterpiece Models.

Money and stress drove him to make the switch.

“Owning an auto repair shop and home repair business was too stressful, and it wasn’t what I liked to do. This is a lot more fun,” he said. “I took a pay cut when I first started this, but the satisfaction of doing something that you enjoy for a living is a whole heck of a lot better.”

Masterpiece Models’ portfolio includes models, exhibits, displays, prototypes and props for television shows. Some recent jobs include a full-sized Mars rover now on display at The Virginia Air & Space Center and a fully remote-controlled 1/6th scale F-16 for a Department of Defense trade show.

But about half of the work his business sees is in casting plastic parts rather than making models.

“Models don’t pay all the bills. Some take months to build,” he said. “The problem is it is 50 percent down and then 50 percent once it is finished. The casting has filled in the back and keeps the cash flow going.”

Case in point: A current big project for the U.S. Navy, which is about 75 percent completed, has been in the works for months. The 18-foot cut-away model of a Los Angels class attack sub will cost upwards of $100,000.

While that big project is taking place, Masterpiece Models will be keeping up with its casting jobs, including making rubber parts for Freightliner and producing tens of thousands of N and Z scale railroad parts a year, although demand is down about 10 percent. It also sells its own line of model-making kits and replica dinosaur bones.

While Masterpiece Models is a specialty business, it faces the same challenges as other small businesses: trying to stay alive.

“We are doing OK,” Geigle said. “We weathered the 2003 dot-com disaster, barely.”

Geigle says this current economic downturn “is déjà vu” from 2003, only on a bigger scale now.

“I’m sure we will weather the economy just fine. It just gets real stressful,” he said. “Everyone has to tighten their belts a little bit.”

An example of the slowdown can be found in a decrease in demand for casting parts. He had five employees in the casting shop but is down to three.

“For the first time in seven years we had nothing to do in the casting shop last week,” Geigle said in early November.

Geigle had been feeling better about the economy earlier in the year after attending a model show in Seattle. Not only did the show have a record turnout, he said, but also Masterpiece Models sold a good number of models. “Everyone was buying,” he said. But a more recent show saw business down a full one-third.

However, a good bit of economic news came recently in the form of a $190,000 contract with the National Museum of the Marine Corps to build four historic diorama models.

He estimates this year’s business at $600,000, up from the approximate $585,000 they saw last year.

One thing he has seen more of this year is contracts with the Department of Defense. That demand has quieted a bit in recent months, but they’ve picked up a couple more since late April.

Most of the work Masterpiece Models does for the Department of Defense if proprietary, so he can’t say what the projects entailed.

Geigle wants to expand the company’s prototype businesses. An example of what they can do hangs on the back wall of his front office and sits on a display in another corner: a prototype and finished examples of his own invention, the EZ Clean Paint Brush.

Geigle had wanted to get a rapid prototyping machine next year to help achieve that goal. A good one costs around $100,000. While he was pre-approved for leasing one, he wanted to make sure the shop had the continuous work to pay for it.

As it turns out, he didn’t have to wait for next year to get his hands on one.

“I had a great deal. Free is a great price,” he said. Instead of using cash, he turned over 3 percent interest in a hydrogen experiment he is working on with his son, Garrett Gordon.

“My son and I developed a way to increase gas mileage on cars 10 percent,” Geigle said of his invention, the Hydrogen Hybrid System. “I got a U.S. Army cargo truck and we are trying to get it from nine to 12 miles per gallon.”

He also is interested in breaking into larger exhibit work. Masterpiece Models has created entire exhibits, including the Midway Math exhibit for A.C. Gilbert’s Discovery Village in Salem, Ore.

Geigle’s company is looking for funding for its Portable Education Pods (PEPS) Exhibit Units. The pods could be taken to schools to promote local museums and such, he said.

The company has done a set for Clark County Public Works composed of five hexagonal towers that explains such processes as stormwater management, natural gardening, wastewater management and residential waste reduction.

According to Masterpiece Models’ blog, the job was to help “raise public awareness about the role Clark County Public Works plays in everyday life and how people impact their environment.”

A future project Geigle envisions focuses a little farther from home: It would show what would happen if Manhattan Island was submerged as the ice caps melt.

Geigle said doing such environmental exhibits might help change the way people look at the environment.

“It is an opportunity to help,” he said, as well as a way to expand the business.

“Global warming is a hot topic.”