How Did I Draw the Top View of the SBD Dauntless

Drawing the vertical views (from the top and bottom) of the SBD Dauntless was more difficult than the side view, because there were no “vertical” photos which you can use to verify and enhance the available plans.

Anyway, I started using everything I could, for example some photos from the restoration done by the Pacific Aviation Museum (Figure 8‑1):

Figure 8-1 Drawing the fuselage and the center wing section

Checking Scale Plans against a General Arrangement Diagram

In my previous post you can find the updated scale plans of the SBD-5 Dauntless, consisting the side and top views. The ultimate shape of depicted airplane resulted from matching my initial drawings against the Douglas general arrangement diagram. I couldn’t do it before, because this diagram comes from the Dauntless maintenance manual, which I received in previous week.

In this post I will show you how I do such a matching using the diagram shown below:

Figure 7-1 General Arrangement Diagram of the SBD-6, March 1944 (it also applies to the SBD-5)

My Drawings of the SBD: the Top View and Other Updates

This Monday I finally got the “Instructions for the Erection and Maintenance of the Model SBD-6 Airplane” book – more than 600 pages about the Dauntless, published by Douglas in March 1944. Because of the lengthy title, I will refer to this book as the “SBD Maintenance Manual” or the “Douglas manual”. In spite that it describes the last produced version, it is also usable for the earlier models: as I mentioned in one of the previous posts, the SBD-1 airframe behind the firewall differs only in a few details (the double gun mount, gunsight type, lack of the YAGI antennas) from the SBD-6.

Inside you can find the SBD-6 general arrangement drawings, as well as the stations diagram (Figure 6-1):

Figure 6-1 The SBD-6 drawings from the Douglas manual

The Fake Difference in the Length

In addition to the side view of the SBD-5 presented in one of my previous posts, I have prepared side views of the earlier Dauntless versions: SBD-2 and SBD-3 (Figure 5-1):

Figure 5-1 Differences between the SBD-2 and SBD-3