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Midway - Douglas SBD Dautless - COMPLETED


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Rejoining you,   - If you'll let me 🙂

with this Airfix 1/72 Dauntless.

Airfix-SBD-Dauntless.jpg

Costing me £2.99 from Home Bargains in 2016.    Did I saw that I saw the new Midway film a couple of weeks ago.

 

Parts.

101-9306.jpg

Building this Midway option.

101-9305.jpg

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Here are a couple of others that I built with Midway in mind.

planes 004

I seem to remember some CGI Vought "Vibrators" in the film but can't recall if there were any Devastators. The "M-485" blue/grey is problematic - I bought a tin of Xtracolour but thought it a little dark, so I "faded" it - I see Airfix say use Hu144 Intermediate Blue which I thought did not look quite right. Though they are invisible in the picture there are pale pink traces of the overpainted red centres to the stars on the Marine Vindicator from Midway Island, which is a Special Hobby/Azur kit - hard work but came out quite well. I also have a Wildcat in the same scheme and after I finish watching your Dauntless build, I might just refurb my old Aifix kit into the same colours. Still trying to find the correct model of Buffalo (F2A-3) to go with the Vindicator as I believe they had a 10" longer front fuselage and a uncuffed, spinnerless  prop so none of my existing 3 kits (F2A-2) would be quite right..

 

Cheers

 

Pete

Edited by PeterB
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Masked up ready for airbrush.

SBD-Masked.jpg

Then I opened a new tin of Humbrol 144 - the worst tin of Humbrol I've ever tried!

 

Went with the Wildcat scheme of 125 - which worked much better.

SBD-H125.jpg

And looks more like what was used in the recent film.

 

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Looks good. Never quite sure about US Navy bomb colours. I know that both Navy and Army started the war with them painted yellow, as I seem to recall were on the Airfix instructions on my kit. The Army started changing to OD after an instruction issued on March 11th 1942, but the Navy seem to have gone through a "Gray" phase before going green according to some sources, but what the heck. I believe the Brits also started in yellow and then went to perhaps Chrome Green and wonder if there was a reason - perhaps yellow was found to be a little too visible to attacking planes? Incidentally I believe the Japanese painted their drop tanks yellow sometimes so they could be easily seen and recovered from the sea and reused, given their shortage of metal.

 

This is a useful link to OP 1664 "US Explosive Ordnance" and various other US documents..

https://maritime.org/doc/ordnance/index.htm#toc

 

Well done,

 

Pete

Edited by PeterB
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