Hi Louis, she's coming along very nicely. The way I did the band on the spinner was wrap it with Bare Metal Foil then use a brand new #10 blade and rock it along the line.

Thanks Bernd. This has been a great kit to build. It's a little tricky building the cockpit and rudder pedals. The details are fantastic though, and well worth the extra trouble. AM really did a great job with this one.

I hope they did just as well on the TBF Avenger. So far from what I can tell on my other Midway Group build Avenger it seems to be on par with the SBD. It's really too bad that AM is no longer in business. Their molds are still being used by other companies to manufacturer certain kits. So at least that part is good.

Rick that is an excellent idea. I'm going to give it a try soon and see how it turns out. I'll post a picture of the results.
Thanks for sharing this thought about how you completed yours.

Thanks Tom for the compliments buddy. I also managed to paint a little more on the PBY earlier this morning. I'm very happy with how the wheels turned out on the PBY too. Thanks again for sharing your photos with me.

Last night I installed the landing gear and doors. I left them dry overnight as it was recommended in the instructions to let the parts dry before going further.

Here's how things went on the SBD this morning:

There are two tiny parts numbered 118, that are support rods that go in between the landing gear strut and door.

Rather than try to clean up the tiny amount of flash that was present on these parts, I simply made a new one from plastic rod. Here's the replacement part glued in position.

The wheels are ready for installation now too. I need to wrap the landing gear oleo strut in ultra bright bare metal foil and paint the brake hoses before I can install the wheels.

I'm pretty sure that Dick Best flew from the Enterprise that fateful morning with a 500 pound bomb. The ones provided in the kit are 1,000 pounders if I'm not mistaken.

So I grabbed what I think is the correct size from the spares box and glued it together...

Here's the size difference with the replacement in the center of the photo below.

I had to paint some red on the tips of the propeller, since I didn't want to use a decal here. Prior to painting the red, I sprayed the whole tip in yellow. The blue stripe still has to be painted on... The blue color goes closest to the prop hub.

Since I was spraying red, I went ahead and painted the insides of the flaps red too...

I don't want any overspray on the red, so I decided to try and pre paint the flaps on the outside before installing them on the plane. Previously, the gray was painted, so now it was simply a matter of spraying the "Blue Gray" color on the top surfaces of the dive brakes.

I had some paint left over so I sprayed out what I had mixed onto the areas shown below. Hopefully this will help with keeping the overspray off the red color on the inside of the flaps / dive brake assembly...

I did some online research on the under wing bomb shackles. It looks like part of the mount was painted in light gray, the same color as the undersurface of the wing. Then part of it was an aluminum color. Since I had to paint the landing gear door strut rods, I decided to install and paint the under wing bomb racks too...

Here's how it looks now.

It's definitely starting to look more like a Dauntless now !

Comments are encouraged. Thanks for following along.

I was wondering which bomb they used at Midway, myself. There was a 1500 lb armor piercing bomb in the inventory, which I've never seen anything on. I believe it came with one of the Accurate Miniatures TBMs, and was also in their seperate armament set. Scouting SBDs usually carried the 500lb, and for attack missions, the 1000 lb, seems the conventional wisdom.

Bombing 6 was carrying 1000lbs bombs because they took off later in the strike package and had a longer deck run. If I remember correctly the sequence was, local cap, then the scouting squadron, (VS-6) with a mix of 500 & 1000 pounders, the bombing squadron (VB-6) with 1000 pounders, the fighter escorts (VF-6), the the torpedo bombers which needed the longest deck runs. Take all the above with a generous grain of salt, I don't have my references handy. According to the records the SBD's at Midway were hauling either Mk 12 500's or Mk 13 1000's with 1/100 sec delay fuses. I have never seen anything saying they were carrying AN-M59 Semi-Armor Piercing 1000 pounders. Definitely no 1600 lbs AP's. The big bomb that comes with the AM Dauntless is the Mk 13 which by all I've seen is the correct one for Midway. According to "Shattered Sword", IIRC, Dick Best's bomb penetrated the flight deck, then at least 1 or 2 other unarmored decks, into the hanger deck and detonated, basically in the cockpit of a fully fueled and armed Kate, amid of the rest of Akagi's torpedo planes.

If you wrote that in a novel everyone would say it was just BS, never could happen. Possibly the single most effective conventional bomb of, if not the war, certainly of the battle.

After all of the information became available and I could make an informed decision, I decided to go ahead and build the kit provided 1,000 bomb. It's the one on top. You can see just how much of a difference in size there was between the 500 and the 1,000 pounders in the picture below.

Tonight I finished painting the propeller tip stripes. The last thing to do was paint the blue ones on... While I was painting blue, I painted the props for the PBY Catalina too. They can be seen in the other build log.

I wanted to get the flaps and dive brakes installed tonight. But I ran into a hiccup...

Remember the nice paint work from before ? Well it looks like the kit instructions are wrong here... It seems that the ones I painted are actually just reversed.

Here you can see the dive brakes have been glued in place in the picture below.

So I had to break out the air brush again and spray them all over again in the correct colors... At least they will be dry for tomorrow...

I was lucky enough to not get any Gray Blue overspray on the inside of the dive brakes. They are still nice and red like they should be. However when I glued the upper dive brake in position on the upper Port Side, I somehow managed to streak a little red paint onto the Gull Gray lower side of the aileron. If you look close in this last picture you can see it. This should be a fairly easy fix...

I'm calling it a night.

Enjoy, and comments are encouraged. Thanks again for following along...

Thanks for the compliments Rick... I'm going to try and locate a copy of the book "Shattered Sword". It's sounding like something I should have in my collection...

Earlier today, I masked off the one piece main canopy section and glued it in place to use as a masking tool. I used white glue to temporarily hold the canopy sections in place...

I also installed the later "Dash-5" pilot's wind screen that doesn't have the opening for the telescopic sight. This was done as I was hoping it would be better at keeping any over spray out of the cockpit as I sprayed the Blue Gray top color... If you look close, you will see that the engine and prop are missing... More on that in a few...

Here's how the SBD looked after the Blue Gray was sprayed on...

I had to remove the engine assembly and cowling, (since I had a minor set back...)

What happened was that I temporarily pushed the propeller on the engine shaft slightly. I wanted to see if I had the tip colors were painted on even. As I tried to remove the prop for painting on the final coat of Blue Gray top color, it pulled the front crankcase and pushrod / ignition wires from the front of the engine. I couldn't glue the part back in place, (since I couldn't access the joint where the crankcase front and the cylinders met), so I carefully pried the cowling off.

In doing so, the engine popped loose too...

But this was actually a blessing in disguise. I needed to paint the firewall "Dog Dish" ring in a metallic color, since the original parts were made of Stainless Steel. Now that the engine and cowling were removed, this gave me the perfect opportunity to paint this area.

I was also able to re-paint the twin cowling mounted machine guns...

Once this was accomplished, I glued the engine back in position...

and the cowling once again...

Then I pressed the propeller back in place for the final time...

Here you can see how the front end looks...

Last night I was able to get the flaps and dive brakes installed. Earlier today I did some minor touch up painting to get them looking better.

You're absolutely correct about that Rick... My parts were broken, so I had to glue them together... This has to be one of the hardest parts of building the kit. That and the rudder pedals...

These next two pictures are for you Rick... Here's the spinner you sent me a while ago. I took your advice and used "Matte Aluminum" Bare Metal Foil. Once I had the wrinkles ironed out, a simple swipe with a razor blade and it was done. It looks pretty good I should add...

and again as seen from the side...

That suggestion worked great !

Thanks again for the advice, AND the part...

As usual, comments are encouraged. I'm hoping to have this one done in a few days...