1/48 Monogram SBD-4 Dauntless Dive Bomber

Thought I'd bring this post over from Jerry's Cherry.....

This SBD is a Confederate Air Force Edition Monogram 1/48 scale SBD Dauntless that was boxed in 1988 (honestly I don't know what variant that Monogram was trying to replicate but it's between a -3 and -4. The -4 seemed fitting so I went with that). The only thing different about this kit from prior boxings is the decal sheet really. I decided to take this kit on largely because I built this thing when I was 12 years old( as I'm sure a lot of us have if we are aircraft buffs) using minimal paint which consisted only of "no name" acrylic black and "green apple green" (no zinc chromate but it was real close), silver enamel, acrylic yellow for the prop tips, some enamel red for the dive flaps, and an enamel grey for the undersides, thinner (which consisted of gasoline-hey gimme a break here, my dad was a mechanic) , and basic model glue. I swabbed the paint on the interior (what little it had) and the undersides. No paint on the top because it was molded in blue, didn't paint the tires or the prop(except for the yellow ends and the silver hub) because they were already molded in black and I guess I did try my hand at painting the canopy frames with some blue paint that I ended up with. Back then I was as happy as a clam! By these days standards it was a disaster! Hasegawa has a hand in this, even though it too has some inaccuracies, because the cockpit is SO lacking. I robbed a lot of parts from this spare Hasegawa kit and used decals from it and some decals from Yellow Wings as well. Was it my best build?? No. But I had fun taking a trip down memory lane building this plane.



Almost the whole cockpit is from the Hasegawa boxing as well as the forward firing gun barrels and main landing gear wheels. There is some PE from Toms Modelworks and the rear gun ammo belts were donated by a fella by the name of Stikpusher. Awesome guy. I drilled out the dive flap holes and did some scratch building throughout the build. This build fairly instrumental to me because it was the first build where I really started getting comfortable with my airbrushing. All exterior paints were Vallejo and interior paints were Model Master.

 A shortl comment about the next picture: I took this one with the purpose of showing the model/ replication of 22-C-14 after it was first loaded onto the carrier Independence. I tried to get the paint scheme as close to this bird as possible so I'll have this pic and then following that the actual pic of the plane(which you all have seen here already but not right next to one another). The now so obvious thing that sticks out to me like a sore thumb is the fact that there is actually only one roundel on the upper wing surface on the port wing. I aint going to worry about it now. If this would have been a build for extreme accuracy I wouln't have been very happy. Pictures offer great help in modeling I continue to find out.

and then finally the cockpit with most of the upgrades from Hasegawa's SBD-4 kit, Toms Modelworks and PE ammo belts for the rear flex gun:

All in all this was a fun build for me. Accuracy was really only there in the paint and there are flaws throughout the build that I would normally take care of. With fun in mind I mixed accuracy with original Monogram intent,however, none of the features that I wanted to work in the beginning of the build work in the name of getting things to fit right and proper so I left alot of Monogram signatures on the aircraft such as the copyright year on the elevators, part numbers in the middle inside portion of the dive flaps and the incorrect centerline bomb and bomb strut.