Artist Is in High Gear Designing Awards : Business: Redondo Beach driving fan’s hobby--making glass trophies for motor-racing events--now pays his bills.

Drawing pictures of hot rods and motorcycles used to earn Jim Searcy nothing but trouble in his 12th-grade English class 40 years ago. Today, it earns him a living.

Owner of a small glass decoration shop in Redondo Beach, Searcy designs trophies for automobile and motorcycle races across the country. The awards, which sell for as much as $8,000 each, contain intricate, three-dimensional images of cars and drivers sandblasted into sheets of glass.

For Searcy, 57, of Hermosa Beach, pairing his interests in racing and art has been profitable. Last year, his one-man workshop, Champ Awards, had sales of almost $100,000.

“Motor racing has always been my love,” Searcy said. “So it kind of went hand-in-hand with my business.”

While fast cars and motorbikes have always fascinated Searcy, he never expected to make much money from his hobby. After a stint in his early 20s racing motorcycles, Searcy worked full time as a mechanical engineer in the aerospace industry.

But by 1970, he had been laid off and was looking for a change of pace. At first, he turned to woodworking, creating carved and sandblasted signs for restaurants, bars and condominiums throughout the South Bay. His work includes the city limit signs for Manhattan Beach.

In the late 1970s, Searcy began applying woodworking techniques to glass. Through trial and error, he began producing small decorations for homes and offices. Eventually, he developed a clientele including the American Cancer Society, cigarette-producer Philip Morris and a beauty salon in Torrance.

Searcy’s favorite work revolves around the sport he loves. In 1979, he made his first trophy for a sprint car race at the now-closed Ascot Park Raceway in Gardena. Since then, Searcy has made more than 500 trophies. His latest project is a set of awards to be presented to the winners of a competition at this year’s Long Beach Grand Prix in April.

Using a technique that took 10 years to master, Searcy sandblasts finely detailed images into the glass with a compressor that generates 100 pounds of pressure per square inch. The delicate process involves a good deal of risk--one mistake can ruin a piece, which typically takes 80 to 100 hours to complete.

“You just don’t have any room for error,” Searcy said. “In a painting, if you make a mistake, you can just paint over it. With glass, if you cut too far, you’ve ruined it.”

Searcy’s customers and recipients of his awards say they value his work for its attention to accuracy, which may become apparent only upon close inspection.

“I was really surprised at the depth of detail in his work,” said Danny Thompson, a race car driver based in Irvine. “If you look at the carving of the motorcycle I have, it shows every spoke on the wheel, the gas cap on the tank, even the tire tread. It’s amazing he can do that in glass.”