Pilot’s Hard Work Turns Fantasy Into a Dream Come True : Flying: The aerobatic plane that chiropractor Robert Griffin began building in his office two years ago is nearly ready to take off.

It may be the ultimate rich guy’s mechanical toy.

But unlike an earthbound Lamborghini, this high-flying performance vehicle can pull out of an engine-screaming, 5,000-foot power dive, carrying G-forces equivalent to seven times a person’s body weight.

And it has been pieced together in a Dana Point chiropractor’s office.

After spending two years and $25,000, Robert Griffin has nearly finished building by hand a Pitts Special stunt plane--an aircraft he describes as a “pilot’s fantasy toy. All of a sudden, I have a plane that test pilots, astronauts and airline pilots drool over. It’s a little like building your own Ferrari.”

While Griffin might have started the project as a thrill-seeking adrenaline junkie, putting the plane together has given him a newfound respect and understanding for the immense natural forces withstood by stunt aircraft.

“It’s been like going to college,” said the 42-year-old chiropractor. “I started out as an instrument-rated pilot, and now I know how to build an airplane.”

About two years ago, Griffin decided that adjusting spines wasn’t exciting or fulfilling enough. So he began taking stunt flying lessons.

“I love healing people,” he said. “But I needed more.”

But merely learning how to make a plane perform spins and loops through the sky wasn’t enough, either.

The planes he flew during aerobatic lessons felt like big, bulky Chevys. After a few practice sessions, Griffin knew he needed a Ferrari of the air. Hoping to put an aerobatic plane together from used parts, he bought a badly damaged Pitts wing section and got an estimate to repair it.

The price tag: a whopping $14,500.

“I got depressed. Then I got mad,” he said. “I figured, ‘Why can’t I fix it myself?’ I had just moved into a big, empty office and with all that room, I started working on it myself.”

With single-minded determination, Griffin began the laborious task of building a stunt plane from a Pitts blueprint in his medical office--after hours, on weekends, and even between patients during business hours.

The frame or skeleton of the 19-foot wing was placed in full view of patients waiting in his office’s reception area.

“Most of them get a big kick out of it,” Griffin said. “Some are real interested. I’ve taken a few of them up” in a rental plane that he uses.

Paul Waroff found it “kind of unusual” to see his chiropractor busily sanding an airplane wing in his office.

“But it didn’t bother me--he’s still a good chiropractor,” Waroff said. “Bob is kind of a live-on-the-edge person. When I said a lot of people have been injured or killed (in stunt planes), he told me: ‘You only live once.’ ”

But Griffin said his free-wheeling attitude stops when it comes to air safety.

After moving the plane from his office because of noxious glue odors and clouds of sawdust created by sanding the wing, Griffin put the project under the watchful eye of Bill Couse.

Couse has run a plane supply outfit at Flabob Airport in Riverside County since 1981. He specializes in selling parts and advice to individuals who want to build new planes from blueprints.

As for Griffin’s Pitts Special, which is housed in one of his hangars: “On a scale of 10, I’d say it rates about a 9,” said Couse. Griffin “has done everything I’ve asked him to do. He’s done a real respectable job for a first-time guy.”

Griffin says the plane will be ready in a few months. Until then, he dreams of tight loops, stomach-churning dives, and having his cheeks flattened by G-forces during some future aerobatics competition.

There, thousands of feet in the sky, the intimacy of flying a machine he created “will be a definite advantage,” Griffin said. “I know what kind of stress she’ll take. And what I’ve learned about building airplanes will make me twice as good (an aerobatic pilot) as I would have been otherwise.”