IPMS - NRG Events

    The NRG is a Chapter Club of the International Plastic Model Society (IPMS), Region 13, Virtual Clubs.  

The year 2024 represented the first time the Nautical Research Guild had a presence at the IPMS National Convention, held in Madison, Wisconsin.  The goal was to make IPMS members and Convention visitors aware of the diversity of model ship building and, of course, the existence of the Guild.  The Conference attracted two thousand modelers who exhibited three thousand models.  

The Directors and volunteers who staffed the Guild table met a lot of interesting fellow modelers, many of whom never considered building any type of model from wood.  This year, the Guild will again be present at the Convention, to be held at Hampton, Virginia from August 6-9.  The Guild will have a table in the vendor’s area staffed throughout the show and is scheduled to give two lectures during the Convention.

As part of the IPMS Convention, there is a national model contest.  This year, for the first time in IPMS history, under the category Sailing Ships, there is a  sub-category for “Wood based kits”.  To date, there is no such sub-category for scratch-built wood models but they can still be entered in the Conversions and Scratch-Built category.  Maybe next year!  At the 2024 Convention, three NRG members won medals; two of those were for wood sailing ships.  And Chairman Sam Parent won the Best Ship Model Award for his gunboat Philadelphia.

All model builders have a common passion: the desire to create a miniature copy of something, whether it is a plane, train, automobile or ship.  If you are an IPMS member and live near Hampton, enter a model (or two) in the contest or simply attend the show as a visitor and stop by the NRG table to say hello.  If you are not a member of IPMS, consider joining.  The greater our representation, the more likely we will have an influence on the organization.

                                                                                  Information on the2025 IPMS National Conference  https://ipmsnationals.org/