Hobby shop opens on Seneca Street

Seneca Street welcomes new hobby shop

A new hobby shop, Section 8 Hobbies, has opened at 2234 Seneca Street in South Buffalo. The shop sells model kits, both new and vintage, model rocketry, tools, paints, supplies, kites, and lots of detail accessories.

“I started out with my father doing model trains when I was seven or eight years old,” says proprietor Justen Hanna, who lives above the shop with his wife and son.

Hanna’s shop is filled from floor to ceiling with model kits. “These are all static display model kits to be built, painted, weathered,” he explains. “Growing up it was always kind of a dream of mine and my father’s to open up a little hobby store,” Justen says. Hanna always had an interest in flight and eventually “gravitated toward aircraft” after his father died in the late 1990s.

Modeling took off after WWII, Hanna explains, when the military had started making models of planes “essentially to identify the good guys from the bad guys. They made silhouette models for gunners to identify enemy aircraft,” he says. “And when those guys came home after the war, they wanted planes. There were companies already set up making silhouette molds for the military and they started marketing them as toys. That’s how it moved into modern plastic modeling.”

“Model making is probably the oldest hobby, probably the first hobby,” Hanna says. “If you go to the Buffalo Science Museum, there are actually Egyptian models which they made for fun. When they were planning a boat to work on the Nile they would build a small scale model of it and their kids would play with them. It taught children problem solving and basic engineering by turning a bunch of sticks into a small boat that would have to float.”

“A lot times people will take kits and they will combine them into a dioramus to tell a story. That’s very popular,” he says, explaining that a diorama is “essentially a small display of various elements that will tell a narrative just by looking at it, almost like a painting on a wall would.”
The name? “It’s a military term,” says Hanna. A “Section 8” is when you are discharged for being mentally unfit for duty. People have said ‘You’re crazy for starting a hobby shop in today’s day and age.’ “Having a family it’s not something you can just jump into,” he says, “so I started Section 8 Hobbies up out of my basement doing mail order from my website, and doing shows—packing the van up, driving to Cleveland, renting tables.”

Hanna plans to offer classes for children and adults, everything from rocketry to basic and advanced model construction. “I have a lot of friends who are more than happy to show their skills,” he says. “They are probably some of the best modelers in the country. They are national, award-winning modelers and they create some pretty amazing stuff.”

Section 8 Hobbies also sells lots of kites, from $2.59 to $20. “Even if you take it to the park and fly it three times in the summer,” Justen says, “you have a memory, and what’s that worth.”

The shop is open Tuesday through Friday 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., weekends from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., and closed Mondays. Special orders also available.

The shop is online at www.section8hobbies.com and on Facebook. For more information call 824-1049 or call the Greater South Buffalo Chamber of Commerce at 824-9942.