Why I Like "Fiddly" Hobbies

My last post about canning discussed my desire for hobbies that focus the mind completely. They also produce something I can use or enjoy in some way. One reason you will not find me staring at the smart phone all that much or watching TV comes from my belief that when I'm done, I can, in the words of my late father-in-law, "have something I can put my hands on." A friend called such hobbies "fierce" but I prefer "fiddly" because they involve a lot of geeky knowledge combined with special tools and learned craft.

I suppose writing has all that going for it. For many of us, hobbies enrich our knowledge while keeping at bay what writer Joseph Conrad called "that obscure feeling that life is but a waste of days."  Hobbies can immerse us in social circles online and in person.

There's also something more at work with fiddly hobbies. Consider the urge refinish furniture, make one's own clothing or knitwear, spin wool, restore old cars, fly fish, and renovate historic houses. All these tasks immerse ourselves not only (when needed) in the virtual but in what I call, with a twist on Baudrillard's term, "The Garden of the Real." Gardening, too, can be a fiddly hobby, when practiced a certain way.

Yet fiddly hobbies are different from other pastimes I enjoy, such as travel done well and off the tourist track.  My travels change me and leave me with memories and some mementos. Fiddly hobbies are like a good holiday from the day-to-day that never ends.

Since the 1960s, I've built scale models. In fact, my earliest modeling memory is of spray-painting my eyeball in 1968, during the Richmond riots following the death of Martin Luther King Jr. As glass broke from looters a block from our house, my mom, without a car, had to phone the hospital to get advice on how to rinse out my eye.  Yet I most recall how good the Jaguar E-Type looked to me in a decidedly non-stock shade of metallic Lilac.

I still build a kit or two every year. My current project honors a deceased friend, Gary Braswell, an avid collector of realistic action figures. He had in his stash a nice American Volunteer Group "Flying Tiger" pilot standing about 12 inches tall as well as, in the same scale, a Zero-Fighter pilot from Pearl Harbor. I decided to pose each pilot with a scale model of his sort of plane.

Getting the kits together involves a lot more detail than my long-lost Jaguar and, for that matter, a lot more safety. Today I use airbrushes, different types of glues, specialized tools, and I take months on a kit. I do a lot of research on aspects of correct paints and the weathering on particular subjects, going so far to mix my own shades of paint for certain projects.

Reloading is my newest fiddly hobby, and I bring to it the same level of research that I employ with models, but even more care. I picture a few reloading tools here, for .38 Special and .45 ACP rounds I shoot for target practice. I have a case trimmer, different measures and a "trickler" for gunpowder, a Swiss-made caliper good to thousandths of an inch. There's a fat Lyman manual with precise information, because a mistake, such as overcharging a bullet with powder, could mean a trip to the hospital or the Great Beyond.

Reloading led me to an epiphany about American gun culture that has almost nothing to do with firearms.

Long ago, most of us could work on our cars, if we wanted. Today, even an oil change is difficult without a lift or special tools. To a large degree, our cars have become a collection of computers on four wheels. Meanwhile, what seemed a safe refuge for tinkerers has vanished. Just a short decade and a half ago, I built both PC and Mac desktops from old parts, and I donated them to needy families and local charities. Now, in the age of SSD drives, flat-screen displays, and wafer-thin laptop cases, there's not a lot inside a CPU that a user can service.

I cannot even imagine working on a smart phone.

Modern gun owners, compared to the old guys who went out to hunt with a bolt-action rifle and kept a simple revolver in the night stand, trick out their firearms with optics, special triggers, new grips, and all sorts of internal and external upgrades. It amazes me how geeky the gun forums become with tales of amateur gun-smithing, barrel swaps, and changes to recoil springs.

Whatever the political and moral questions that swirl around America's fetish for guns, there's this fiddly-hobby, hot-rodder aspect that most critics and enthusiasts of firearms tend to ignore.  Of course, for some of the gun hobbyists I meet, I'd feel safer if they decided to build a few model planes.

Whatever  the hobby, the need to tinker exists on both sides of the Atlantic; in the UK I've been shown many DIY projects and the products of fiddly hobbies. There is something delightful about the hours slipping by, slow enough to savor their passing, as one engages in a fiddly hobby.  I might, if I can find one still on radio, have a baseball game in the background.

You just won't catch me in front of a TV watching hours of baseball or other sports. Now playing baseball, that most fiddly of sports? Perhaps in my next life.

Meanwhile, I have my 2017 fishing license and that involves infinite fiddling with lures, leaders, sinkers, respooling old reels, and stocking the cooler. I'm a fierce fisherman, too. I don't tend to go fishing to drink beer. It's about catching fish, finding the deep spots where they linger, scouting a bank for just the right overhanging tree to cast under (but sometimes into). Soon I'll have a lifetime fishing and hunting license from the State of Virginia, so I can continue my fiddly hobbies until I'm too old to clamber into a boat or get up a tree into a deer stand.