AJ Savage Bomb Bay Doors

The new Roden 1/72 AJ-1 Savage kit provides interior detail in the bomb bay and conventional bombs to go in it, but the bomb bay doors are provided as a single piece, providing no view into the bomb bay.

Since the AJ Savage was literally designed around the Mk 4 nuclear bomb (one is provided in the kit), it seems appropriate that its cavernous bomb bay be visible...

Thanks to Jerry Wells, we have illustrations that can be used to convert the single-piece doors to separate ones in their open positions.

There were four separate, fairly thick doors with lightening holes along the sides. The upper door was attached to the fuselage and the lower door by piano hinges.

The doors were interchangeable. In the following illustration, they are partly open. The opening and closing was accomplished by a mechanism (A) between the upper and lower doors combined with an idler strut at both ends of the lower door that was attached to the fuselage bulkhead at either end of the bomb bay.

 The following illustration depicts the position of the actuation links between the upper and lower doors when the doors are closed:

Another view of the idler strut on the forward left hand side with the doors fully open:

The actuator was a very complicated mechanism that converted the longitudinal extension of a hydraulic piston into a rotation of the outboard link of the actuator that resulted in the doors being pulled together. The idler struts at each end of the bomb bay caused the doors to move outboard as they came together.

Note that when the doors are open, the links of the actuator mechanism are visible; they don't appear to extend inboard any farther than the bomb bay opening, however (this is a picture of the Lycoming AJ-2 Savage with the support structure in the bomb bay for the jet engine test rig):

 

The idler struts are more prominent:

 

For an introduction to the Roden kit and links to other posts, see https://tailspintopics.blogspot.com/2022/08/roden-172-north-american-aj-1-savage.html