Did Philip Jose Farmer have an interest in model building?

Back in the '70s, and into the '80s, my father read a lot of series. I recall there was James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, a lot of Charles Dickens' books along with Tolkien, E. E. 'Doc' Smith, Hugh Garner, Richard Rohmer, and no doubt many I've forgotten. Some of the lighter ones I read too, or he started after I had finished them. One of those was Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series. At the time I didn't quite get it, but with the power of the internet I realize that maybe the problem was I started with the second bookThe Fabulous Riverboat, and then gave up in frustration because I wasn't aware of the setup in the first book. I bought the 3rd book, The Dark Design, because it had airships on the cover. That was a selling point to me at the time :-) I didn't get far with that one either. I bought books 1 and 4 with a hope that I'd get around to reading and appreciating them, but no dice. I gave the series to my father and he read the whole thing. I don't know what he thought of it, and just because he finished it didn't imply he liked it. He was a person who didn't give up just because. Awhile ago I thought I'd give the series another try over the summer, reading it in the right order this time! I also bought the Riverworld and Other Stories volume a few weeks back to round out the set.

I've finished To Your Scattered Bodies Go, and have started The Fabulous Riverboat. But, before getting too far into book 2, I thought I'd try a few short stories in the last book.

Me being me, I noted two passages that seemed to show some sort of at least a cursory appreciation of model building. There's this one from early on in book 1 where the reincarnated Sir Richard Francis Burton and Peter Jarius Frigate, who is a fictional stand-in for Philip Jose Farmer, work out the design of a boat to take them up to The River's source:

They were sitting on bamboo stools before Burton's hut. On a little bamboo table in front of them was a model of a boat made from pine and bamboo. It had a double hull across the top of which was a platform with a low railing in the centre. It had a single mast, very tall, with a fore-and-aft rig, a balloon jib sail, and a slightly raised bridge with a wheel. Burton and Frigate had used chert knives and the edge of scissors to carve the model of the catamaran. 

Although all of humankind has been reincarnated along The River, they apparently hadn't met with E. L. Moore, so no balsa :-)

The piece I read next was Farmer's short story, Brass and Gold (or Horse and Zeppelin in Beverly Hills), in book 5 - apparently the mere mention of airships will still attract me to a story :-) Late in the story we meet the protagonist's girlfriend's father, Mr. Goldbeater, who was a Zeppelin pilot in World War I, and is apparently now an avid builder of model Zeppelins:

They found Mr. Goldbeater in the backyard working on a model of his last ship, which had gone down in flames in a raid over England. It was his tour de force model. Thirty feet long, it had four gondolas with gasoline motors that worked and a control gondola in which a small man could fit if he didn't mind a prenatal position.

And Mr. Goldbeater had a house which was crowded with smaller models of Zeppelins and dirigibles.

'Mr. Goldbeater'? Goldbeater's skin was a material used to make gas bags for Zeppelins. Inside jokes aside, it's an interesting story.

Will these model building passages continue to appear as I read on? I'll let you know.