Good Things in Small Packages : Model Maker Famous for Re-Creating World in Miniature

EL CAJON, Calif. —  Jim Dore builds models, but they aren’t just models. They’re miniature, almost perfect re-creations of the world Dore sees--whether it be in the shape of a shopping mall, a new city hall or a device used to shatter nuclear weapons.

Dore’s El Cajon shop is a metaphor for the finished product--a clean, starkly efficient operation that runs with the confidence of a Swiss clock. Dore sees his models as mirrors of the way we live today--or, in some cases, the way we should live.

He comes to such work naturally. He started out, as a kid in Queens, N.Y., building model airplanes.

Dore has turned model-making into a business that he said earns between $10,000 and $270,000 a project. He averages about 75 models a year.

As owner of Associated Model Services, Dore has such clients as the U.S. Grant Hotel in San Diego, the Centre City Development Corp., Mattel Toys and the Israeli government.

For the Israelis, he made a model of an aircraft carrier, for which he said he was paid by the Central Intelligence Agency.

“I don’t ask no questions. The CIA asked me to make it. They signed the check. What can I say?”

Dore has made models of the San Onofre nuclear power plant and the Gaslamp Quarter. He said he has a security clearance that allows him to work for a flock of government defense contractors, including General Dynamics and Hughes Aircraft.

One model was used in the Strategic Defense Initiative--the so-called “Star Wars”--proposal, he said.

“We made a model of this high-tech rock, which got very involved,” Dore said. “That’s what this thing is called--a high-tech rock. A high-tech rock is a particle-beam weapon. It hurls a rock at a missile--a missile fired from the Soviet Union.”

Dore, 42, is a driven, intense man with a thick New York accent. He has a quick sense of humor, accentuated by a fast delivery and the attitude that model makers are best motivated by “a sheer sense of lunacy. You’d have to be a lunatic to do this for a living,” he said.

And yet he loves it. Dore started out as a mechanic in an air-frame and power-plant shop, working on big jet engines. He’s dabbled in everything from electronics to woodcarving and says he used to moonlight by making models, until he realized he was having much more fun doing that.

“Your work has to be fun,” he said. “I mean, it’s the only way to live.”

To Dore, work is fun. He employs much of his expertise in his personal passions, including his own automobiles. He has a Corvette, the engine of which he renovated to the point that, he said, it can travel close to 190 m.p.h.

Four years ago, model-making became Dore’s all-consuming passion and full-time occupation. He said that he works 60 to 80 hours a week and that 24-hour shifts are never out of the question.

The models he makes are used by everybody from developers to government agents. Basically, they are exact replicas created to try to sell something--a new shopping center, a toy, a redevelopment project, for example.

‘We Think He’s Great’

Fran Elgas works with Harry L. Summers, a large local development firm that built the Plaza at La Jolla, a 17-acre, 850,000-square-foot development in the Golden Triangle.

“About four years ago, maybe five, we saw this article about this fellow who made prototype models for aerospace,” Elgas said. “They were wonderful, wonderful models. Well, we went out there and were very impressed with both Jim and his facility. His attention to detail is just amazing. He’d done a model of the Gaslamp Quarter, complete with little door signs and lamp posts, just about everything you could think of. He made a model for us and has since done three others. We think he’s great.”

Elgas said that Dore excels at visualizing plans three-dimensionally, often working from nothing but blueprints and aerial photographs, and that he has saved the Summers people “thousands and thousands of dollars” in visualizing problems in the model phase before construction.

Dore’s great passion is detail, and this, he said, is most of what he means by lunacy. He makes light standards, featuring green, yellow and red lights, that stand maybe half-an-inch high.

“It can get pretty crazy, trying to put those things together at 3 in the morning with a deadline crawling all over you,” he said.

He has made models of the Plaza at La Jolla and the Radisson Hotel in Mission Valley, the Centerside development in Mission Valley and one of the entire UC San Diego campus.

Often he doesn’t know why the models are being made and said private developers can be even more guarded than defense contractors.

Studio Work

He has worked for Hollywood studios, and several former employees have since gone to work for Disney and George Lucas. Others have shifted to television commercials.

Dore has worked for concerns in several foreign countries, including China. Recently, he got a letter from Iran.

“They said they wanted to add my shop to their database. I have no idea how they found out about me. Maybe they heard about me through the defense work I do. I called the FBI, and they came over and got the letter.”

Dore is not strictly a maker of models or of miniatures. The art of making miniatures, he said, is peopled mostly by amateurs or hobbyists. His work--and he stated this sternly--is strictly the province of professionals.

“The thing that separates our work from that of amateurs is the attention to detail. We do an awesome amount of detail.”