In addition to his bombing armament, Jig Dog had a pair of 50 caliber machine guns at his disposal, mounted on the nose of the fuse. These machine guns, mounted on top of the fuse just behind the engine cowl, were quite handy when in a dive run but seldom if ever used for air to air combat. The guns were mostly concealed under the fuselage skin, with just a small amount sticking out of 2 gun troughs at the firewall and the breech of the guns protruding into the cockpit. This page will cover the fabrication of the external portion only, as I will cover the breech construction in the "Jig Dog's Office" section later.

To start, I calculated the scale dimensions of the guns the best I could and translated them to the nearest size tubing available in styrene and aluminum. I used 1/4" styrene tube for the outer "cooling" sleeve and 5/32" aluminum tube for the 50 cal gun barrels. In order to get the cooling holes in the outer sleeves, I made a jig for the drill press that provided a fence to slide the tube along while drilling. On this fence, I made tick marks that designated the spacing of the holes. By lining the end of the tube up to every other tick mark, drilling, sliding and repeating, I obtained equally space holes going through the top and bottom of the sleeve. Rotating the tube 90 degrees, I used the "skipped" tick marks for alignment, which gave me the alternating holes on the two sides. I only drilled these part way back on the tubes since you really can't see more than one or two of them up inside the fuse anyway. I cut the aluminum gun barrels to length and CA'd a small piece of styrene tube on each end to act as a bushing that centers the barrels inside the outer sleeves. After painting the outer sleeves, I CA'd the barrels inside of the sleeves. Next I made a large balsa bushing that glued onto the back end of each gun, which were then epoxied into each gun trough tube of the fuse.

The fullscale 50 cal guns had black outer sleeves and natural metal finish on the barrels, which is part of the reason why I chose styrene for the outer and aluminum for the inner tubes. Also, the styrene is much easier to drill than the aluminum without the tube spinning or sliding on you while drilling. However, once I airbrushed the smoke weathering onto the gun barrels, the whole thing looks pretty much the same color. Lastly, the styrene tube does not come in as many diameter increments as the aluminum, so I pretty much had to use aluminum to get the right size tubing for the barrels.

I used a warm scale black mixture for the smoke and clearcoated them with a flat finish. While you don't see much of the holes I drilled in the outer sleeves, you can still see a few of them and this was great practice as a dry run for the twin 30 cal guns on the rear seat turret ring.

Outside of just a few small static details that I plan to add after the plane is done, including the bomb, static prop and Yagi antennae, this pretty much completes the airframe, detailing, painting and weathering of my SBD... finally! Next I went on to the cockpit section and completed it, then came back here to continue the airframe details, Next up here... making a 3-blade "static prop" for display.

"Making a Static Prop"