His Small World Is a Model of Perfection That Is Skillfully Built

Jim Dore builds models, but they aren’t just models. They are miniature, almost perfect re-creations of the world Dore sees--whether 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 of the finished product--a clean, starkly efficient operation that runs with the confidence of a clock made in Switzerland. 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, building model airplanes. And don’t think that kids connecting Part A to Part B with foul-smelling glue don’t have a future or a crack at a six-figure income.

Cost of Projects

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

As owner of Associated Model Services, Dore has clients ranging from the U. S. Grant Hotel to the Centre City Development Corp. to Mattel Toys to the Israeli government.

For the Israelis, he made a model of an aircraft carrier, for which he says 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 says he has a security clearance that allows him to work for a flock of governmental defense contractors, including General Dynamics and Hughes Aircraft.

One model was used in the Strategic Defense Initiative proposal, he says.

“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 quick 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 says.

Variety of Jobs

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 has dabbled in everything from electronics to woodcarving and says he used to moonlight by making models, until he realized that 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 whose engine he renovated, to the point that, he says, it can now travel close to 190 m.p.h.

Four years ago, model-making became Dore’s all-consuming passion and full-time occupation. He says he now 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, etc.

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 4 years ago, maybe 5, we saw this article about this fellow who made prototype models for aerospace,� Elgas recalls. “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 says 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 says, is most of what he means by lunacy. He makes light standards, featuring green, yellow and red lights, that stand maybe a half-inch in height.

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

Among Dore’s clients are BSHA (a local architectural firm), local developer Ernest Hahn, UC San Diego and the city of El Cajon.

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 UCSD campus.

Often, he doesn’t know why the models are being made and says 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 the Disney and George Lucas houses. 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 is, he says, peopled mostly by amateurs or hobbyists. His work--and he states 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.�

Dore says such subtleties and “out of this world� details are a further dividing line between amateurs and pros. He hires a woman, for instance, who does nothing but make trees no bigger than a thumbnail.

When hired by the Gaslamp Quarter Council to re-create the Gaslamp Quarter in miniature, he added in “hookers, bag ladies, bums, as much real-life detail as possible. And it was staggering, if I do say so myself.�

Dore came to San Diego in 1964 as part of his Navy hitch. He later went to Vietnam as part of his duty and ended up in San Diego, married to a woman named Esther who now helps him run the shop.

The Dores work with a staff of eight that they say works as feverishly--and with as much self-proclaimed lunacy--as the Dores do. Dore used to have 24 employees but says quality ebbed with so many.

“I prize quality over quantity. I want to be the best more than I want to be a millionaire. I want to be one of the top five model makers in the country. I’m not there yet, but someday, I will be.�