Museums & Reference
Explore museums, collections, and online reference resources useful to scale modelers. Whether you’re researching markings, colors, equipment, vehicles, aircraft, ships, or historical details, these resources can help bring a project to life.
Museums to Visit
Great museums and collections worth the trip. Check each museum’s official website for current hours, admission, exhibitions, and photography policies before visiting.
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Air Zoo Aerospace & Science Museum
Portage, Michigan
A Smithsonian-affiliated aerospace and science museum with more than 100 air and space artifacts, historic aircraft, interactive exhibits, and an active restoration center.
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Studebaker National Museum
South Bend, Indiana
Preserves the automotive and industrial history of Studebaker through historic vehicles, artifacts, exhibits, and collections documenting the company's South Bend legacy.
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Grissom Air Museum
Peru, Indiana
Features historic military aircraft and exhibits focused on the former Grissom Air Force Base, including Cold War-era subjects, outdoor aircraft displays, and aviation history.
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Gilmore Car Museum
Hickory Corners, Michigan
A major automotive museum with an extensive collection of historic vehicles, rotating exhibits, and a large campus dedicated to preserving automobile history and heritage.
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Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum
Indianapolis, Indiana
Preserves the history of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and motorsports through historic race cars, pace cars, photographs, trophies, film, artifacts, and other racing collections.
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National Museum of the U.S. Air Force
Dayton, Ohio
The world's largest military aviation museum, with more than 350 aerospace vehicles and missiles plus thousands of artifacts covering U.S. Air Force and aviation history.
Online Reference Libraries
Online resources and research collections that provide photos, drawings, documents, kit information, and other reference material useful to scale modelers.
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Prime Portal
A modeler-focused photographic reference library featuring detailed walkarounds of military vehicles, aircraft, weapons, equipment, and other subjects from contributors around the world.
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Smithsonian Air & Space Archives
Extensive aviation and space research collections containing photographs, technical documents, aircraft history records, manuals, and more than two million technical and scale drawings.
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National Museum of the U.S. Air Force Collections
Online access to museum collection information, aircraft and artifact research, restoration material, imagery, and other resources from the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force.
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NavSource Naval History
A large photographic and historical reference resource covering U.S. Navy ships and related vessels, with ship histories, images, identification information, and other naval reference material.
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Scalemates
A comprehensive scale-modeling database with kit information, release histories, reviews, instructions, reference material, manufacturer data, project tracking, and an active modeling community.