Creating the Tail Wheel

The Dauntless had fixed tail wheel of a typical design among the carrier-based aircraft. The tail wheel assembly consisted a fork connected to two solid-made beams, which movement was countered by a shock strut. The beams and the shock strut were attached to the last bulkhead of the fuselage (Figure 82‑1):

Figure 82-1 Tail wheel assembly

Tracing Aircraft Skin Details: Center Wing and the Fuselage

This week I continue mapping the SBD-5 Dauntless skin panels onto my model. After tracing the outer wing sections, described in the previous post, I traced the center wing section (Figure 65‑1):

Figure 65-1 Traced panels on the center wing

As you can see in the picture, I also traced the contours of the wheel bay on the wing surfaces. (These openings disappear, when you enter mesh edit mode, because they are dynamically created by Boolean modifiers. Thus such contours will be useful during further work, because in this way you can see these edges while editing the mesh).

Modeling the Fin Fairing

In the SBD Dauntless the fillet along the fin and the fuselage was formed from the bent bottom edges of the fin panels. I am showing it in Figure 36‑1:

Figure 36-1 Details of the fin fairing

(To make some of these panel seams more visible on thee photos, I sketched along them thin lines). You can observe that each fin panel overlaps the next one, starting from the tip stamped as the part of one of the fuselage doors (see Figure 35‑8 in the previous post). The outer contours of these panes are not perfectly aligned: you can see small overlaps on the photos (Figure 36‑1). Surprisingly, such a detail makes the modeling more difficult. However, the most difficult part will be the seam between the fin and the horizontal tailplane fairings (see Figure 36‑1). It runs along the fuselage longeron, across the fillet between the stabilizers and fuselage.

Modeling the Empennage (2)

After some verification of the reference contours that I described in the previous week, I am coming back to modeling of the horizontal tailplane.

In the previous post I created the reference airfoil of its root rib. Now I copied it into a new object, straighten along the fuselage centerline, and finally extruded spanwise (Figure 33‑1):

Figure 33-1 Forming the basic contour of the horizontal tailplane