Congrats Mike!
Helldiver soars in hands of restorer
Rare World War II dive bomber becomes one man's life's work
BY MARY BAUER
Pioneer Press
Mike Rawson has planned his life around one hell of a plane.
He grew up on the stories of his grandfather and uncles about a rare World War II dive bomber they'd found while hunting in Black Rock Canyon near the Great Salt Lake in Utah.
The plane, called a Helldiver, occupied his imagination, and as he matured the plane's mystique only grew. Rawson chose his high school classes based on the skills he'd need to restore the plane: welding, machine shop and sheet metal.
"I remember sitting in church, bored out of my mind, and dreaming about going up there and getting this plane," said Rawson, 49.
Thanks to his fixation, decades of scavenging, and maybe a little prayer after all, Rawson has almost finished his life's work — a nearly complete restoration of a Helldiver after five years of full-time work.
The plane sits, awaiting paint, in his hangar at the Anoka County Airport near Blaine. It will later be moved to the National Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.
When complete, it will be one of six Helldivers in the world, said Rawson, of Minneapolis. The plane already has been mentioned in aviation history magazines and Web sites.
Rawson has been restoring planes since he graduated from high school and over the years has brought a number of rare and one-of-a-kind planes back to life.
"Some guys spend their lives hanging out in bars," he said. "I spent mine hanging out in the hangar."
But the Helldiver loomed largest in his imagination because of its national and personal history.
The Navy's Curtiss SB2C Helldiver — the Army Air Forces' version was called an A-25 Shrike — attacked ships. Pilots took the plane into a vertical dive, dropped their payload and pulled up just in time to avoid crashing into the ship's deck.
Many of the planes were lost in the war, Rawson said. And although more than 7,000 were built, the craft had little civilian use, so after the war the Navy began scrapping them. Few survived.
"Whoever was in charge of getting rid of them did a very good job," Rawson said.
Rawson's connection with the planes started with those family stories about two Helldivers that crashed Sept. 18, 1944, in Black Rock Canyon. Men just back from Guadalcanal were ferrying planes to an air base in California when they became disoriented in low clouds and flew into a box canyon.
The Air Force recovered their bodies, but the steep hillsides made recovery of the planes impossible. Rawson heard about the planes for years, but he moved with his parents to Minnesota before he had a chance to see the wreckage.
In 1976, at age 20, he returned to Utah to see for himself.
Reaching the planes required a rigorous 2½-mile hike to 5,000 feet above the lake and took five hours.
He found that one plane had broken up and the more intact one had become partly buried by sediment over the years. Still, most of the machine guns and cockpit gear remained.
"You could identify a lot of it," he said. "It was like someone took a china dish and smashed it on the floor as hard they could. It was in chunks."
He stuffed instrument panels and cockpit gear into paper bags that disintegrated before he got far. He carried the equipment in his arms.
It was the first of many trips. He returned throughout the 1980s, each time retrieving 40 or 50 pounds of salvage.
But it was the work of other salvagers in the mid-1980s that jump-started a full-scale restoration. Divers recovered three Helldivers from Lake Washington in Seattle and, after winning a court battle with the Navy for possession, sold them to Rawson.
"When I learned about the ones in the lake, that's when I knew I was going to do it," he said.
But Rawson couldn't let go of the Salt Lake Helldivers of his uncles' stories. In 1999, he asked the Air Force to help him recover the two planes, and officials agreed, with a condition: Rawson could use the parts to restore a plane that would go into an Air Force museum.
The Air Force sent a team of men and a Blackhawk helicopter to recover as much as they could. The museum contracted with Rawson for the restoration.
Rawson's restoration uses the Salt Lake material but is based on one of the Seattle Helldivers. The other two planes will be saved for future restorations. All were heavily damaged because the Navy used them for live fire practice before sinking them. Rawson used the skin pieces as templates, retracing each and every rivet hole onto new pieces of aircraft-grade aluminum.
The rivets line up better using such templates, Rawson said, rather than a blueprint, which he didn't have until recently anyway.
"When it's done this way, it comes out perfect," he said.
Most of the planes had been stripped, so Rawson found original radios on eBay. He found canopies that had been rescued by gardeners for mini-greenhouses.
The engine came from the surplus of an original manufacturer in Canada, and while operable, the plane will never be flown — the museum forbids it. And Rawson couldn't fly it anyway. He's not a pilot.
"I fix 'em; they fly 'em," he said.
The work has been slow. Hundreds of rivets have yet to be placed, each by hand. He then will paint the plane in Air Force colors: olive drab and gray, with a star and bars on the side.
"I could have cut corners and been done with it by now," Rawson said. "But this is a once-in-a-lifetime chance. I don't want to compromise."
Found it here:
http://www.twincities.com/mld/pioneerpress/14293469.htm
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It gets a little closer everyday 
I will get some updated photos soon.Thanks Mike
4 thumbs up mr rawson on your devotion, your labor of love & your word. you are both a gentleman & an asset to aviation history!!