Meet the Man Who Put the Magic in the Models

For a generation of budding automotive enthusiasts, building model cars was not just a childhood pastime, but the only way to tangibly connect with the machines of our dreams when we were too young to actually drive, let alone buy, the real thing. Most of us eventually abandoned the hobby as adulthood opened the doors to full-scale project vehicles that demanded far more time and money. Precious few of us are ever lucky (or talented) enough to build models for a living. George Bojaciuk is one those lucky and talented few, but it happened almost by accident.

George started out like a lot of us – model cement perpetually on his fingertips and a miniature fleet of Detroit muscle on his bookshelves – except for the fact that he never stopped building. In fact, as an adult his skills only became sharper, and his creativity reached new heights as he attempted to make his 1/25 scale world look more like the real one. When a design manager position opened up at Franklin Mint in the late 1990s, he figured, “what the hell, let’s see what happens.”

He mailed in his resume along with some pictures of projects he’d completed and managed to get a meeting with the design team director. He didn’t get the manager’s job, but he was invited to do some freelance work on a few projects. Trained as a respiratory therapist and working as a home care specialist at the time, George didn’t really have the industry experience Franklin Mint was looking for. But during his meeting with the design manager they discussed his personal projects, and they recognized his talent and passion for small details. They later invited him back for a formal interview after failing to find a design manager.

On his second visit, George was taken to a conference room where one prototype of a Franklin model sat on the table. He was given a pen and paper and told he had two hours to review the model and make notes of what he felt was wrong with it. They were expecting maybe a dozen odd notes. His scrutiny filled four pages of the legal pad. They were astonished by his thoroughness and recognized the opportunity before them. They finally offered him the job.

“I thought I’d won the lottery. I was actually going to earn a paycheck for doing my hobby. And a good one at that,” George muses. “I never would have guessed I’d earn more as a model car designer than working in healthcare. I didn’t even have a formal design education.”

What George lacked in formal training he more than made up for in real-world experience. He grew up in the muscle car scene, working at times in speed shops that were active in drag racing, such as S&W Race Cars. He knows things because he saw things up close. And he seemingly catalogued all this knowledge and put it to work creating incredibly accurate models.

“The little details are everything. Most guys just paint a chassis black. Maybe gloss, maybe satin. Depends on what they have around,” George says. “But if the real car had a satin black chassis, there was no way I’d ever paint it gloss. It has to be right.”

It was this attention to detail that got him in the doors at Franklin Mint, but his knack for adding in the “extras” is what made him a star.

“I always liked building dioramas. Garage scenes are my favorite. They tell a story. And I thought I could add some storytelling to the collectibles, to help Franklin’s models stand out as more than just a car.”

Perhaps the best example of this is the 1946 Chevy Suburban he produced as his first Christmas special edition. “Our photo team went to visit GM’s heritage center to document the actual vehicle in their collection,” George recalls. “The representative told them [rival company] Danbury Mint was there last week reviewing the very same truck. I knew ours would have to be spectacular.”

He grins as he continues, “Both companies’ ‘46 Suburbans came out that year [2001]. Danbury had their little red truck, literally just a replica of the truck in the GM collection. And then there was the Franklin truck, finished in red but with dark green fenders and all dressed up for holiday fun. I’d put a Christmas tree on the roof rack – Danbury didn’t even have a roof rack – and a wreath on the grille. There were wrapped presents inside, boxes of Christmas lights, a sled. It was very festive. I actually felt bad for Danbury.”

Franklin Mint got a lot of mileage out of that Suburban, George having later created a summer camp version outfitted with a wooden canoe (and paddles), a tackle box, fly fishing rod, gas lantern, blanket rolls and picnic basket. “I went down the street to a neighbor who had an Old Towne canoe and got all my measurements,” he tells me. “It’s basically a dead-on Old Towne replica, but [Franklin] decided to avoid licensing conflicts by giving it a wood finish instead of their signature red, green or blue.” Eventually an ambulance, sherrif’s wagon, and a ski patrol truck were derived from the same basic vehicle.

There were countless other examples over the years, and George quickly became the go-to guy for holiday special editions. At one professional expo, he introduced himself to the president of another model company who replied, “Oh, you’re just the accessories guy.” George wore that remark as a badge of honor, and that exec later apologized to him once he got an up-close look at his actual work.

His stay at Franklin Mint was surprisingly short – just six years or so – as he struggled at times with management’s willingness to forego accuracy for the sake of marketability. One such example was a 1973 Mercedes 450 SL roadster. As George recalls, “One of the owners was insistent that we should do it in a brown color that wasn’t even offered on that car. ‘Just walk down Rodeo Drive and you’ll see them all over,’ she told me. I just shook my head and agreed to it in the moment, but spec’d a correct color when it went into production. She’d forgotten all about our conversation.”

George had no shortage of ideas. He really wanted to make dioramas, and came up with a roadside billboard with interchangeable vintage advertising. He produced prototypes that had keychains hanging from the ignition switch and 8-track tapes on the front seat. Most of his ideas never saw daylight. There were lots of stillborn concepts at Franklin Mint when he left, but plenty of other model companies were eager to have George’s talents. He eventually left to form GSB Design Concepts, working a consulting designer to other firms including, perhaps ironically, Danbury Mint.

Eventually he backed off other commitments in order to consult, by his choice, to just one – GMP out of Georgia. There he got to work in larger scales than the typical 1/25 that the collectible market prefers. Particularly impressive was the 1/8 scale Porsche 550a Spyder – the kind James Dean made famous by his untimely death at the wheel – that I first saw and fell in love with at the SEMA show more than a decade ago. I must have visited the GMP booth a dozen times that year, astonished by the realism imparted by its designer. I seriously contemplated the marital repercussions of coming home with a several-thousand-dollar model from that show. It is, hands down, my favorite example of George’s work.

His personal favorite, however, is the 1/12 scale Shelby Cobra he created for GMP. He’s particularly proud of the details he was able to worked into it, including the fuel lines and real leather seats. It’s also 100% accurate – he rejected one of the pre-production prototypes (shown here) because the shift pattern on the shift knob was incorrect.

He always did his design work in the tidy work space he’d built into his home basement, just as so many of us started out. But his is next-level, including an extensive research library, a miniature downdraft spray booth, and a lightbox for reviewing color accuracy and shooting photography. His shelves are stocked with paints of all kinds, perhaps every color ever created specifically for model building, but also real automotive paints.

“A lot of my work involved researching the correct colors and finishes, and sending samples to the production facilities in Asia. I would send them sample panels in the correct finish for them to source locally. Because I live so close to Eastwood’s headquarters, I would run up and buy aerosol cans of detail paints. I also used them on a lot of my personal builds.”

In another corner of his basement is a wall of storage shelving that houses an impressive collection of new old-stock kits going back decades. In his mind, he’d still like to build them all, but he admits it would take him another full lifetime to do so. He’s gradually winnowing his inventory.

George’s independent contributions to the hobby eventually included creating accurate scale reproductions of license plates (long before Photoshop and hi-res printers made this easy) as well as publishing a book on building model muscle cars. He’s now working with 3D scanning and printing through his colleague Wylde Parnell at Canuck 3D to help create more accurate enhancements for off-the-shelf kits. He recently helped design a left-hand drive dashboard for a customer whose MGB kit was produced only in a right-hand drive configuration.

While he’s contributed his expertise to most of the major model magazines over the years, today George produces his own email newsletter for model builders, where he shares details of his latest projects and occasionally puts some of kits up for sale. He builds mostly for himself now, though he also helps out friends on their special projects.

On his bench during my visit was an East-German Trabant taxi cab, a far cry from the usual V8-powered muscle he usually builds but an exact replica of the car he got to drive on a trip to Budapest last year. He’s already hard at work replicating every detail, down to the grimy license plate. But you probably could have guessed that by now.