B-24 Bomb Bay Doors - 1/12th scale ARF B-24 by MakerMark5000

Last crawled date: 3 years, 4 months ago

This is designed for my VQ Warbirds ARF B-24 Liberator so I could drop some (fake) bombs. after all, Bombers need to drop stuff. Normally B-24 Liberators have fairly simple rolling doors like a roll top desk but that's pretty hard to do in a small model. My solution is a result of needing to drop stuff and knowing that absolutely no one notices these are not the scale rolling doors. They are simple shovel type clam shell doors that when open are concealed in the fuselage so it looks normal in flight and works well.
There are four doors, two on the right and two on the left operate independently so I can make two bomb runs. They could be set be set up as four independent doors or all on one servo if wanted.
The brackets pop onto the door runners and are held in place with Allen head flanged servo screws (#4 x 1/2") . The center connector pin is trapped between the two center brackets. After the Brackets are in pop the doors onto the square side of the pins.
The door works best with about 1/2"-3/4" wide piece of balsa glued to the outer edge of the door, sort of makes a scoop that helps move the stuff towards the opening. I didn't bake it into the print because it takes a lot of extra time and filament to print the overhang.
I used two small servos to operate the doors, The servos are mounted on top under the top hatch, one on each side and a piano wire connection down to each set of doors, left and right. The "bombs" can load from the top or bottom.
Included are two doors, one is the full bomb bay door that could be used in a pull-pull door motion system for more realism. The other is a half door that is attached to the fuselage for the appearance of real working doors.