#PLASTIC MODEL BUILDER MOVIE#

IPMS Toronto, formed in 1966, is one of the organization’s largest Canadian groups, says Low, chapter president for the last three decades. There are thousands of IPMS chapters worldwide.

#PLASTIC MODEL BUILDER MOVIE#

When there was no CGI in the movie industry, it was us modellers.” Some completely scratch-build an entire engine or interior when the kit does not provide one and take hundreds of hours to complete a single model. Some (modellers) are pure masters at their craft. Some (IPMS) members’ models are in the Smithsonian. “The masterpieces put together by some modellers would challenge that assumption. “Many people - recalling models they built and hung from their ceilings as kids - think these are toys,” says Low. Members of both the International Plastic Modellers Society (IPMS) Toronto and the Armor Modeling and Preservation Society (AMPS) Fort York, they are just two of many local history buffs taking on a pastime for which patience and attention to detail are crucial. Midtown Toronto resident Harvey Low also became enthralled with the hobby after watching the 1969 movie “Battle of Britain.” At age six, he built his first model, a British WWII Bristol Beaufighter in 1:72.īut while Low and McRorie got their respective starts in plastic modelling as boys, the hobby is hardly child’s play. (Those ratios refer to a model’s scale 1:35 means the real thing is 35 times larger than the facsimile.) Sixty years later – 35 of which were spent as an aerospace engineer, designing large business jets for De Havilland (Bombardier) – the Port Credit resident who “built 1:1 aircraft all my life,” has, in a sense, downsized as a retiree: he’s traded real planes for the 1:35 kind. “That’s what kids did back in those days,” he says. With his keen interest in military vehicles, McRorie remembers buying his first model kit for a dollar and building it at home in a single afternoon.

As a child growing up near the Bovington Camp military base in Dorset, England, in the 1960s, Sandy McRorie frequented its tank museum.

Plastic model builder