Adding Wingtip Lights and Hardpoint Ferrings

Wingtip Navigation Lights

You'll find your local Arts & Crafts store to be an invaluable source in coming up with some of the various scale details you need. I went to our local store and picked up a small bag of little imitation Christmas Lights, which made for some pretty cool wingtip navigation lights.
To install them, I put masking tape on the wingtips and tack glued the bulbs on with CA. Next I used Micro-Lite Auto Body Putty (like Bondo) to fabricate a "blob" of material around the bulb. I built it up to the rough shape of the teardrop light fixture that holds the bulb. I then carved it to a closer shape, popped it off the wing, and sanded it down to the final shape.

After removing the masking tape I then glued the finished fixture onto the wingtip. Note that the left wing had a red light, and the right wing had a green one. However, the bulbs actually looked blue when not lit, so that's the color I chose.

Center-Section Hardpoint Fairings

Each wing of the SBD has four hardpoints for mounting bombs, fuel tanks, etc. on them. Three of these hardpoints are on the wing center section, and one is on the outboard wings beyond the dihedral joint. The three on the center section had removable aerodynamic fairings that covered each hardpoint when not in use, the outboard points did not.
To make these fairings, I carved them out of balsa and sanded to shape. I hit them all with Sanding Sealer and WB poly, but used the glass cloth on the larger ones only, not the smaller/thinner ones.

I then glued them to pieces of Plastistruct 10mil white styrene to form the fairing flanges. After adding primer and sanding, they looked like one piece. I then glued them into position with Medium CA, and they will get rivet treatment when I get to that phase of the project. I'll cover the building of the "exposed" outboard hardpoints later as well.