VIDEO: Engineer Spends 15-Years, 20,000 Hours Building 1:3 Scale Ferrari 312PB

Consider creating a 1/3 scale model car from scratch; consider working 40 hr. weeks for ten years on your model.You photograph every single part and then you sketch the parts. You then create every single part by hand since this is a unique minature and there are no parts to requisition or purchase. This is what Pierre Scerri did. He created molds. He machined every part by hand where the difference in 1/1000 of an inch is so critical that the engine might not even work.

This meticulous labor of love was a dream of his to own the Ferrari that he could never afford. He fell in love with the sound of a 12 cylinder Ferrari engine and thus began his quest to create and own his very own Ferrari.

Pierre Scerri is a French telecommunications engineer and model builder, who gained fame in 1998 after having his highly accurate 1:3 scale model of a Ferrari 312 PB featured on the BBC programme Jeremy Clarkson's Extreme Machines.

He began his project for the model in 1978, out of desire for having a Ferrari that could function in his dining room . Pierre Bardinon, owner of the Mas du Clos race track, allowed Scerri to take detailed photographs of the actual car on display at the adjacent Ferrari museum. Based on those photographs, he drafted the schematics and made the molds for all parts of the model, a process which took 15 years.

In 1989, he finally completed assembly of the engine, a perfect scaled replica of the Flat-12 cylinder engine found on the 312PB. He reportedly took extra time tuning the engine so that it would sound like the full-scale model. The project was finally completed in December 1992.

Scerri is now working on 3 new models, a Ferrari 330 P4, another Ferrari 312PB and an engine for a Ferrari 250 GTO, all 1:3 scale.