Tornado Building Plans

These are the Houlton building plans, developed by Jerry Houlton and a community of Tornado builders around 1980.

Download These Tornado Building Plans

These descriptions were originally intended to be used together with the ITA/ISAF issued plans, but it is quite straightforward to build a boat without the ITA/ISAF plan sets. Jerry Houlton stopped building Tornados a long time ago, but these plans lived on thanks to Tornado afficiando Kevin Cook in the USA. Kevin has continously supplied amateur Tornado builders with plans, in a non-profit attempt to keep the wooden Tornado alive. It was trough Kevin the plans used for digitizing was sourced, during christmas 2004.

Amateur buildt Tornados are an important piece of Tornado history, and these digitized plans will hopefully keep this part of the Tornado story living in the 21. century. The original idea behind having the Tornado as an olympic class, besides adding a multihull to the olympic scene, was to have a boat you could build in your backyard and go to the olympics with. And for the first years this was the way it was done, but alas, no more..

A lot has happened with the Tornado since these plans were used to produce competitive boats. Today Marstrms Nomex honeycomb, pre-preg epoxy, autoclaved space-age boats rules the class.A carbon mast has also been added to the boat, further removing the class from it's humble olympic ideals. However, wooden boats can still be high-performers, and these plans combined with some creative thinking can produce very stiff and fast hulls. An effort to modernize amateur buildt Tornados by using a mixture of polystyrene foam bulkheads and maximum fullness hulls are discussed on the Yahoo TornadoCat list. If you, the reader, has ideas and opinions about how the amateur can produce even better Tornados, or just want to get in touch with other Tornado sailors, please join the fray at the TornadoCat forum.

In addition to the Houlton plans, an uncomplete set of russian plans from the '80s have surfaced. Some additional information can be learnt by studying these images. The russian plans was for a boat to compete in one of the olympics during the '80s.

Copyright: There has been done some research to discover wether these plans are subject to copyright or other intellectual property issues. As far as it has been possible to ascertain, publication of these plans does not infringe on any rights. Please let us know if we are mistaken. If you build a set of hulls, or a boat, pleace contact the ITA (http://www.tornado.org) to have it registered, measured and get the necessary payment information for the building fee.

A zip file containing all these images plus a 32 page .pdf (Adobe Reader) building manual is available in Downloads. For revisions, and to have experiences and facts added to the plan sets,
please contact Rolf Nilsen at the Yahoo TornadoCat list.