SBD-3 Dauntless - Academy

I was inspired for this build after watching the remake of the motion picture "Midway" from 2019 for about the 17th time. The plot is a little bit hard to follow without knowledge of the historical caracters and context, and all scenes with airplanes, carrier vessels, explosions etc. have been created artifically. Not a single Zero or Dauntless in this movie is for real. Yet, the story around Richard Best, one of the movie heros played by Ed Skrein, is more or less accurate, and his achievements during the Battle of Midway are undisputed. It is his bird I recreated.

I used the Academy kit from their "Midway" range and fully built it OOB. Not a single piece of aftermarket was used except for the antenna rigging, which was done with EZ line. The kit is a re-issue of the venerable Accurate Miniatures kit. Academy recently released a few other, reasonably priced US Navy kits based on AM moulds. All of them are highly recommended and are good candidates to be stashed if you fancy US Navy warbirds.