Bunker Hill TBM-3 Avenger

This is the second of two kits I bought at an old-fashioned hobby shop in Staunton, VA (the first was an Academy SDB-1 Dauntless). If you're in the area, I highly recommend stopping by and looking at their stock. The shop is in downtown Staunton on Beverly Street. There's also a web site and the store owner ship kits anywhere. I'll leave it up to you, dear reader, to find the web address as I don't want to make this posting into an advert for a small business.

In any case, let's get on to the kit. This is Academy's release of the Accurate Miniatures 1:48 scale TBM-3 Avenger. This kit came with Cartograph decals, which worked beautifully. Unlike the SDB-1 kit, it did not come with a canopy mask. That's OK in my book because I'm a glutton for punishment when it comes to painting canopies.

Some say this kit is over-engineered, and, of course, they are correct. I will take an over-engineered kit rather than an under engineered kit any day of the week. The interior is well detailed, but that didn't stop me from buying an Eduard add-on to upgrade the instrument panel and the other electronics located in the radio operator's compartment (which you can see if you look into the open hatch).

If I had to do this model over again, I would first point my browser to Scalemates.com and download the original Accurate Miniatures instructions for this kit. They are much better than the Academy instructions, which, in my opinion, have much to be desired. For example, the AM instructions give detailed written instructions for assembling and installing the gun turret whereas the Academy instructions gives only an exploded diagram. If I had gone to Scalemates to begin with, I would be able to elevate the gun and traverse the turret instead of having it frozen in place like it is now. But then again, “this is a scale model and not a toy”, as my father told a young me as a kid.

This model depicts a TBM-3 flying from the USS Bunker Hill (CV-17). The Bunker Hill, along with the Franklin, were the only Essex class carriers that were never modernized, probably because of the damaged the sustained in combat operations.

The Avenger has always intrigued me. For one, it's a huge plane. Larger and heavier (by some 400 pounds) than a P-47 Thunderbolt, the Avenger was the best torpedo bomber the US had during WWII. As depicted in this model, the Avenger is showing its chops as a close air support platform carrying four 500-pound bombs and eight rockets under the wings. The P-47 wasn't too shabby either in the fighter-bomber role.

Not only does the Avenger have a bomb bay (how cool is that), but there's also a turret equipped with .50 cal machine gun (an engineering marvel of the time) and a .30 cal in a ventral mount manned by the radio operator who lived in the belly of the beast.

The pilot is physically separated from the rest of the crew. There's no way to reach him after takeoff. I imagine the Avenger is somewhat of a deathtrap, too. While researching, I learned that the radio compartment wasn't armored, so the radio operator was vulnerable, and many were wounded. Also, one article I read said there were no recorded accounts of a turret gunner successfully bailing out of a turret. From what I could see from this model, the turret was a very tight squeeze. I'm not sure if I would have liked to have been a crewman on an Avenger.

Getting back to the model, I used a combination of Tamiya and Valejo paints with a topcoat of Mr. Color flat clear. I tried to use a light hand on the weathering, but I didn't want the plane to look like it just came from the factory.

You can build two versions of the Avenger from the kit – the other being a plane from the USS Essex. Since the Essex version requires painting a “double diamond” figure on the vertical stabilizer and on the wings, I chose the Bunker Hill version since the Arrow was rendered using the supplied decals.

It took me about three months to complete this kit, working a couple of hours each week. This will probably be the last model for a few months since I've run out of room to display them.

10 additional images. Click to enlarge.