Tsunami construction photos

[Rebuild Tsunami]

Re: Tsunami construction photos

Little JR is correct. The project is moving slowly but surely. I was not able to be in the Flight Expo/Tsunami booth due to my own commitments in the embroidery world. It was good to see the members of Flight Expo grow in their PR. I know from experience it is tough to get out there and stand tall and promote. I started this back in 1987 at Oshkosh in the Tsunami booth. We had a small TV (with a VCR) a hand out and Tsunami was nose to nose with the Leeward Air Ranch Special (now Galloping Ghost). My daughter was 4 years old, John and Andrew (Janet's boys) were only 2 & 3. Even back then there was the Nay sayers that love to argue with you in the booth. A lot of them did not even know about Air Racing in Reno, NV.

Janet and I coordinated our efforts for the Reno Air Races - but if you remember there was no selling in the pits. First we tried along side the road (really bad idea). Then due to Dad renting space from Reddich's we were able to put out a table in front of their building. I stood there for 4 days straight - my legs were burnt, my face I think had a permanent smile pasted on. This was the year we had landing gear trouble on Saturday. On Sunday - all of the supporters came out. I could not believe that they found me in such a remote location - at that time there were no vendors in this area.

John did not mention that we are doing a raffle to continue raise money for the project. First prize is a 1/2 hour ride in Sweet Revenge (also known as Platinum Plus). Go to our web site www.rebuildtsunami.org and check out the other prizes. The tickets cost $10 - the drawing will be held on September 25, 2011 here in Princeton, MN (do the math and this is the 20 year anniversary of the last flight - or the 25 anniversary of the first flight). To purchase a ticket we must have either cash, money order or check made out to Flight Expo. You can send this to our address P.O. Box 155, Zimmerman, MN 55398 or purchase one at the Reno Air Races.

We also will have a new surprise that has been two years in the making on display in our booth at Reno.

See all of you race fans soon. Sharon Sandberg (the middle daughter or as John Dilley named me "The Independent One")

[Fence Sence]

Re: Tsunami construction photos

This quote could have been from 1982, 83, 84, and 85...

Not the first time this project took longer than planned. Just take your time and do it right.

x2. We don't care if it takes longer, we just want it done right .

[AAFO_WSagar]

Re: Tsunami construction photos

Sharon Sandberg (the middle daughter or as John Dilley named me "The Independent One")

Thanks for coming here Sharon! Having you and LittleJR bring us the straight scoop during this, HOWEVER LONG it takes, project, is icing on the cake of just KNOWING that it IS happening!

BIG to you guys for sticking your necks out and making it happen...... AGAIN!

[DWYER]

Re: Tsunami construction photos

Are you guys still planning on a booth at Reno?

[Jason S.]

Re: Tsunami construction photos

Are you guys still planning on a booth at Reno?

Last I heard was yes, but they won't have the tail section with them.
Jason

[xmh53wrench]

Re: Tsunami construction photos

Really great read.....but Im sure most of you already know this. Two hours of my life very well spent on this and its hotlinks. Thanks...

[LittleJR]

Re: Tsunami construction photos

May, 2018 Tsunami Update

First, in response to GRNDP51's post in "Thoughts on FB vs AAFO" thread.

"The Tsunami Page has also been posting pretty often on FB, it would be like the old days to have a team like that posting progress on AAFO. I am curious of what their agenda is going forward. It seems like they have a mess of all this stuff being done at once and it's hard to keep track. I guess it's better to have a lot of stuff going on that one thing at a time? LAst I saw was finishing up the horizontal stab."

Our agenda is to break the 3km speed record and race at Reno.

I don't remember if I posted anything here in the last three years so I will give you a synopsis of how we got to where we are now and what our objectives are moving forward.

We started the project in early 2010, at that time my Aunt Sharon Sandberg was leading the charge. She wanted to restore the plane and place it in a museum. I also wanted to restore the aircraft, but I wanted it to race. If anyone remembers that is where the idea of two air-frames would be built. (I was incredibly young and naive at that time) We began dissembling the aircraft and building two of everything. That program lasted about a year or two before we threw in the towel. We were in over our heads, I had never restored an aircraft before and Tsunami probably wasn't the greatest project to cut my teeth on.

Fast forward to 2015, I had been restoring aircraft for a number of years and wanted to give the project another shot. Not happy with our original craftsmanship, I started from scratch. I began building parts I was confident I could complete, which is why I built ribs for the entire aircraft. At the same time, we had never assembled all the tooling and I wanted to find out what we had and what needed to be rebuilt. This turned out to be one of the more time consuming tasks to date. Not only were we missing about two thirds of the tooling, but since everything was handmade, no two parts were the same.
Once I had built all the ribs and installed them in the jigs, I figured building the vertical was about the next easiest part. While I was building the vertical, I quickly discovered they had changed the design several times (even before the first flight). The aircraft has plans, but they are more or less detailed sketches and there ar many iterations. The plans leave a lot up to the builder. So in order to build the assembly, I did as much research as I could. I needed to find out why certain parts were missing and what changes improved the aircraft. Ultimately, I ended up constructing it the way it was designed. Once I was well on my way to assembling the vertical, I moved onto the wing. I began installing stringers, but before long I had questions regarding production breaks and until I drill the rest of the wing apart I won’t find the answers.

That brings us to April of 2017. In April of last year Greg Read, Chiwami Takagi and Jason Nelson flew out from California to volunteer for a week and help give the project a boost. Greg is a composites expert, his wife Chiwami races in the sport class and Jason is the lead sheet metal fabricator at NASA's Dryden facility. In order to set up enough projects for them while they were in town, I had a friend design templates for the top formers of the fuselage and prepped the vertical so it would be ready to skin. That week we were able to skin the sides of the vertical and build the form blocks for the fuselage. After they left I completed the vertical and moved on to the fuselage. I built nearly every structural part on the fuselage aside from the firewall and the longerons this past year. We currently have a machinist working on cutting out the firewall, but again the plans don’t match the part, so we are trying to find out why. Once the firewall is finished we will start assembling the fuselage.

A few months ago a gentleman (Wally Johnson) reached out to me saying he had helped out with the project from time to time when he was young and would like to volunteer on the project. Since then he has been coming up every Wednesday and Saturday and helping me out with the build. Two weeks ago Jason Nelson came back for a week and we assembled the left side of the horizontal and started the right. As of this afternoon Wally and I finished fitting the rear spar and began on the front spar. Hopefully in the next month we will begin mating the two sides.

To give people an idea of where I want the project to go, it makes sense to look to the past. Tsunami was a community effort. If any of you saw the gear door in 1991, there were over a hundred names engraved on it. Most of those people had a significant role in making Tsunami a reality. I hope to have a similar list on the opposite gear door. The only way Tsunami is going to race again, is if more people get involved. It doesn’t matter if it is through financial contributions, working on the plane, promoting the project, writing articles, writing bios about the original crew members, sending in old photos/videos to put on the website, web design, designing, engineering and drafting aircraft parts, finding sponsors etc. So if you are interested in helping let me know.

Regardless, Tsunami is the coolest Unlimited to ever exist and has the potential to be the fastest, though I may be a little biased 😉 I think Tsunami has a real chance to influence the future of air racing as well as bring new people into aviation. It has the ability to connect multiple generations. It’s not a Warbird, but it has a rich history and it is designed in such a way that it can incorporate new technology and push limits of propeller driven technology.

Anyway, I hope that gives you a small glimpse into my thoughts and what is going on with the project. I will do my best to update this site monthly with the progress on Tsunami from here on out. If anyone has any questions please fire away!
Regards,
Johnny Bjornstad

[RAD2LTR]

Re: Tsunami construction photos

The gear door showing all the people who were involved back in the day.


Thanks for the update. This is exactly the sort of stuff the site needs. Seeing the occasonal update on FB is cool, but updates here are even better. You have actually made a huge amount of progress. Slow and steady is far better than sitting totally idle. Reading this post kinda made my day.

Do you have any plans for a booth or something at Oshkosh?

Will

[LittleJR]

Re: Tsunami construction photos

The gear door showing all the people who were involved back in the day.


Thanks for the update. This is exactly the sort of stuff the site needs. Seeing the occasonal update on FB is cool, but updates here are even better. You have actually made a huge amount of progress. Slow and steady is far better than sitting totally idle. Reading this post kinda made my day.

Do you have any plans for a booth or something at Oshkosh?

Will

Yes, but not for Tsunami. We will have a wing at the pioneer airport teaching kids how to rib stitch to help promote our Build A Plane program.

John

[kiwiracefan]

Re: Tsunami construction photos

Thank you for the updates, i do get them on FB, but its nice to see the update here with so much information

[Coug86]

Re: Tsunami construction photos

Great update - thanks! I saw Tsunami race and would dearly love to see it race again, and share that with my daughter and grandson. I appreciate you posting here as I'm not a FB user. Even links to FB would be great.

[GRNDP51]

Re: Tsunami construction photos

Very happy I said something, made my day as well reading the whole story. I'm also incredibly impressed with how much progress has been made as I didn't know that the project 'realistically' started in 2015. I thought this was all the work that had been done since 2011 and it's amazing what has been done in 2-3 years.

Something I've wanted to ask about is when you have some free time or maybe have someone that would be willing to help you... On the FB page a few years back you posted a few pictures from the original build on a sheet of paper that outlined all of the parts and how many months they would take to make and the time frame of the Tsunami build (post is dated August 13, 2016). Is there any way you could make a new list like that just showing all of the steps that you have finished, are currently working on, and have planned? Also curious if you are following a similar time frame/ steps as the original build. I know aviation pretty well, but it's sometimes hard to determine from pictures what exactly you have in progress. As of what I've seen I think you have all of the jigs completed? Would be awesome to know how this project is progressing in comparison to how it was built the first time.

Crazy to look at those pictures and see from step 1 of the wing form blocks in January '80 to flights tests in November '81

[LittleJR]

Re: Tsunami construction photos

Very happy I said something, made my day as well reading the whole story. I'm also incredibly impressed with how much progress has been made as I didn't know that the project 'realistically' started in 2015. I thought this was all the work that had been done since 2011 and it's amazing what has been done in 2-3 years.

Something I've wanted to ask about is when you have some free time or maybe have someone that would be willing to help you... On the FB page a few years back you posted a few pictures from the original build on a sheet of paper that outlined all of the parts and how many months they would take to make and the time frame of the Tsunami build (post is dated August 13, 2016). Is there any way you could make a new list like that just showing all of the steps that you have finished, are currently working on, and have planned? Also curious if you are following a similar time frame/ steps as the original build. I know aviation pretty well, but it's sometimes hard to determine from pictures what exactly you have in progress. As of what I've seen I think you have all of the jigs completed? Would be awesome to know how this project is progressing in comparison to how it was built the first time.

Crazy to look at those pictures and see from step 1 of the wing form blocks in January '80 to flights tests in November '81

Obviously there timeline quite was quite ambitious. I have been meaning to put together a gantt chart similarly to Bolands. So to answer your question, yes I can do that. I will back date it to 2015 through our expected completion. I certainly didn't plan to follow there timeline and I would have go back through old photos to find out if they built as planned, but for whatever reason I believe we have built in similar stages. That would be interesting to see. I'll put something together this week.

John

[GRNDP51]

Re: Tsunami construction photos

Obviously there timeline quite was quite ambitious. I have been meaning to put together a gantt chart similarly to Bolands. So to answer your question, yes I can do that. I will back date it to 2015 through our expected completion. I certainly didn't plan to follow there timeline and I would have go back through old photos to find out if they built as planned, but for whatever reason I believe we have built in similar stages. That would be interesting to see. I'll put something together this week.

John

Looking forward to it! If anything it seems like in the original build they put together a jig then the part for the jig, you have most if not all of the jigs done and that’s a great step! Thanks again for keeping us in tune

[Desertdawg]

Re: Tsunami construction photos

Johnny,

Oh man, your write-up was awesome and nice photos.

Please keep adding to this thread and updating your friends here at AAFO HangerTalk.

This is very much appreciated and you made my Monday morning reading your update.