One of TSA’s collaborative companies is Odegaard Wings,
owned for the last 10 years by Brent Meester. Brent and Cindy both underlined
how their companies are built on Beck’s basic plan of action, “When someone
else is making a piece with excellence, buy it from them; if no one else is
making the piece then we make it ourselves and others buy it from us.” The
research and development needed to re-create a piece with excellence is
extremely expensive. Recently a customer’s wing needed two new fuselage attach
fittings made from extruded aluminum. The customer funded the research and
Brent is now able to produce this fitting.
The equipment needed to reproduce Corsair wings includes a
480 volt spot welder equipped with water cooled tips for spot welding aluminum.
This piece weighs 10,000 pounds and it cost a small fortune in time and money
to get the power hooked up. "The spot welding on Corsair is on the aft fuselage
and it is also used on P51 wings is some spots but the place spot welding was most needed was the P51 gear doors as the door flange needed to be smooth on both sides." Harvey McKinnon
Numerous
Grand Champion award winning War Birds have resulted due to TSA and Odegaard
Wings’ attention to original details. Using the old style unmarked rivets, and going
to the extreme of removing the 2024-T3 markings on aircraft aluminum,
re-stamping the aluminum with an exact copy of the original markings, and then priming
over the markings so the markings bleed through like the original are a couple
of examples…the results are only visible in the wheel wells!
Brent’s looking
for employees!
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