TOM VOGT Columbian staff writer

Building the Mars rover represented a huge leap into the unknown for John Geigle. Geigle doesn't work for NASA. He makes models.

His version of the Mars vehicle is destined for a museum, not the Red Planet. Still, the project took Geigle and his crew into what literally was uncharted territory. They built a full-sized replica to represent the two rovers that landed on Mars three years ago. Because of tight security, they built it without benefit of NASA's plans.

Their only guide was the publicly available information on a NASA Web site. “We built it from scratch with nothing to look at except photos,” Geigle said a few days ago in his Masterpiece Models workshop, just east of Hazel Dell. “We had to flesh it out from there.” Knowing what a component looks like isn't enough. It's tough to duplicate something if you don't know how big it is, and that can require a little sleuthing to get it to the correct scale.

“First, we find an object with a known size” in a photo, Geigle said. “Our Rosetta Stone was a power strip that was in a photo. We have one.” Once they measured their power strip, they could use the same item in the NASA photo as an improvised yardstick. There were a thousand or more rover photos available on the NASA Web site, Geigle said, so his team was able to view it from just about every perspective.

Now, after three months of work, the team has just a few finishing touches left, said Robert Willard, manager of the fabrication shop. That includes a couple of miles of wire and cable that will replicate the rover's power and communication systems. At the end of the month, the full-sized model -- which is about 5 feet wide and just under 5 feet tall -- will be shipped to the Virginia Air & Space Center, in Hampton, Va. The six-wheeled rover represents Spirit and Opportunity, the two robot geologists (as NASA refers to them) that landed on opposite sides of Mars in January 2004. While the rover is one of the toughest assignments his shop has undertaken, it's not the most expensive. There isn't a price tag dangling from the rover that a viewer can peek at, but Geigle said that museums wanting the next generation of Mars rover can expect to pay about $50,000 for it. That's still short of the $75,000 a museum in the Daytona, Fla., area paid for full-size models of two 1903 race cars -- the Olds Pirate and the Winton Bullet. But Geigle doesn't build only for museums and science centers. His craftsmen have built scale models for motion pictures and industrial miniatures for trade shows, as well as replicas for hobbyists? well, OK, toys. Geigle's shop builds radio-controlled boats, some with 3-horsepower engines. One customer, who is a boater, actually shows off his scale-model tugboat by putting it to work. When he's ready to call it a day, he sets his scale-model tug into the water and uses it to berth his boat.