'Every man should have a hobby'

Colin Burgess (79), a retired industrial modeller who built sections of the scale model for the Mossgas refinery in the 1980s, still has a good pair of hands and is keeping them busy by continuing to live out his lifelong love for the trade, just on a much smaller scale.

- Alida de Beer

In between building delicate scale model aeroplanes, motorcycles, cars and helicopters, he is also keeping busy with woodwork, painting and 4x4 camping with his partner, Esle.

They live in Fancourt, but Burgess' enthusiasm for his hobbies has necessitated a man cave - which is a second home not far from there in Blanco. Here he has enough space to store about 400 boxes of scale models that still need to be built. "If I did one per month, I would be 132 years old when I finish," he chuckles, pointing to the full shelves and boxes stacked up all over the floor.

"The idea of a model is to prove the engineering before anything gets built on site. It costs far less to find problems on the model than out on site."