Welcome to the 1/72 Scale W.W. II Aviation Website!
This hobby started on my 10th birthday on May 26, 1955. Our family had just emigrated from Belgium. We were staying at the Commodore Perry Hotel in Toledo, Ohio until we could find a house. My dad gave me a B-52 Stratofortress kit, and I was hooked.
I built some when I was a teen-ager, then took up the hobby again in the late 1980’s. Things really got of hand in 2002, when I started building almost 100 a year, mostly in the winter. There are now 1,641 in the collection.
At first, I just did regular molded kits. As I ran out, I started modifying kits, then went on to vacu-form kits. In the past few years, I’ve been doing a lot of scratch-built kits from wooden dowels, sheet plastic, hand-cut propellers and odds and ends from the parts boxes.
I’ve also stretched the definition of W.W. II somewhat in order to keep building. I started building planes that flew mostly before the war. I figured there must have been a few sitting on some airfield. I also started building planes that were designed during the war, but didn’t fly until after, or in some cases, not at all.
If you have some rare kit that I could add to my collection, please let me know by e-mailing mjtheisen@gmail.com.
Due to the large number of airplanes in the collection, they are on separate pages by country, below.