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

During previous weeks I was working on the bottom view and other details of the SBD Dauntless. For example — I added a modified side view that reveals the engine and the cowling hidden under the NACA ring (Figure 9‑1):

Figure 9-1 The SBD-5: side and bottom views

Because of the formatting issues of this post I had to split the original square drawing into two parts:

Figure 9-2 Outer wing panel (“lying flat”, without the dihedral)

(Click here to get these drawings as a single, high-resolution image). As in the case of the top view I draw the outer wing panel without its dihedral.

Detailing of the bottom view resulted in minor updates of the side view (Figure 9‑3):

Figure 9-3 Updated side view

(See the high-resolution version of this image).

I have already started working on the front view. One of the elements I need for the model are the key cross sections, thus I identified their shapes, and incorporated them into this drawing (Figure 9‑4):

Figure 9-4 Additional information: fuselage cross-sections

I did not draw the first sections of the NACA cowling here, because they will be visible on the front view. As you can see there are large gaps between sections 2 and 3 and between 8 and 9. Why I did not add these intermediate contours? Because nothing special “happens” between these bulkheads: the resulting shape will be automatically interpolated during modeling.

I sketched the engine and the inner cowling, because I am going to model these parts. Analyzing this area I discovered many differences between the earlier versions (SBD-2, -3, -4) and the later versions (SBD-5, -6) than were not mentioned in any previous publications about the SBD:

• Different cross section B (in the SBD-1…SBD-4 it had wider, elliptic shape);
• Different widths of the oil radiator scoop;
• Yet another carburetor air scoop: you can find in the books that in the SBD-5 it was removed from the NACA cowling and replaced by two intakes located between upper cylinders of the radial engine. However, they did not mention that they were just additional intakes for the filtered air (for the takeoff/landing from provisional ground airstrips). The main air scoop was still at the top of the fuselage, but since SBD-5 it was hidden behind the NACA cowling!

In the next post I will elaborate about these unpublished differences between the SBD versions, showing them on drawings. I will also prepare a simplified front view (for my model I do not need to redraw all the minor details there).

The drawings of this aircraft will be complete soon. I think that I will start building the first part of the model within two weeks.