Douglas SBD-5 Restoration

Try the National museum of Naval Aviation at NAS Pensacola. The Museum recently opened a library. The Museum owns 14 SBDs, with 3 on display.

Bob

Bob,

Thanks for trying...The SBD we are working on is in the Naval Aviation Museum Restoration Hanger. We have the maintenance, and operational manuals at our disposal in the library, but not the structural repair manual. I was hoping someone in the warbird community could steer me to someone who has one that would be willing to sell to me at a reasonable price.

 There is very extensive damage to the leading edges of both wings due to crash landing into Lake Michigan in 1943. We pretty much have to reverse engineer everything that is not repairable, which takes many man hours to accomplish. If we had scaled structural diagrams and prints, this task would make it much easier to replicate the parts needed to complete this restoration. At present we have three major restorations in progress. In the picuture below you can see the firewall of the F6F Hell Cat on the right, the Dauntless that we are working on is in a noes down attitude. The other, not in this picture, is the F4U-1 "Birdcage" Corsair. Working on the SBD is truely a labor of love and we want to do everything in our power to make this a very accurate restoration.

I sincerely hope you can spread the word.

Thanks for responding to our request, Jim Myers

James, I have a TBM structural repair manual which you are welcome to if that would be useful.  I imagine basic structural repair would be the same.  Unfortunately I can't make Oshkosh this year to deliver personally, but postage no problem. Rgds Stan Webber

Thanks for the offer Mr. Webber.   You are absolutely correct in saying structural repair would  be the same no matter what you are restoring, but the SBD is a totally different animal than the TBM.  All repair manuals for different aircraft are similar in nature, but  not  exactly the same. We need references, such as, engineering drawings as for example, the bulk heads, stringers, stiffeners, and wing spars to replicate parts of the aircraft that are totally missing due to corrosion and the crash landing of this aircraft. Having that resource at our finger tips would reduce the hours of restoration time needed to accurately construct the missing parts of this aircraft. If we cannot find such resource, we will be forced to take apart  the undamaged port wing to reverse engineer the internal parts of the starboard wing. Of course this will almost double the man hours to restore this fine warbird.

 If I did this right in loading the picture below: Here are the two wings of the SBD. Notice the leading edge of the starboard wing is toast while the port wing in fore ground is still all in tact.