![]() |
|
|
Our project's goal - break the existing record of 763 mph (1,228 km/h) by reaching 800 mph (1,287 km/h)! |
|
We invite you to...
NAE™ Project: Update February 14, 2009 Ladies and Gentlemen: Today Steve Wallace, John Winchester, Bernard McVay, Tim Finley, Von Armstrong, Rich Pengelley, Chris Greene, Eric Helpenstell, Keith Zanghi , Eric and Pam McClain and Ed Shadle met at the hanger once again to work on the North American Eagle™ and move a little closer to our goal of breaking the 763 mph world land speed record. Many of our team members work virtual. This week Jon Higley, Don Mitchell, Mike Thoe, Rex Walter, and Ron Doll have been burning the midnight oil working on their tasks. Slim Lawson, our oldest team member is in the hospital fighting for his life. Just two weeks ago, Ed, John Drury, Omar, and Keith celebrated Slim's 89th Birthday. We ask you to remember him in your prayers. First order of business of the day was to pull the Eagle out of the hangar and do some field testing of the Tropos® onboard network and Topcon GPS units. With 14 satellites providing position, Steve switch roles and with the Eagle at rest outside the hanger, drove throughout the Pierce County area in his car, sending data back to his laptop back at the hangar. The test was a great success as the Tropos® Metromesh™ technology provided wireless broadband while gathering GPS locations from Steve's car. Every bump, dip, acceleration, and braking was recorded. A Tropos® Networks MetroMesh™ mobile wireless router is placed in the Eagle's nose cone which will communicate with fixed Tropos MetroMesh routers to deliver a wireless secure broadband network. As a result, we will receive incoming data in real time at our command center. Until now, with onboard Larson Davis data acquisition equipment from PCB Piezotronics delivering 3.2 million signals a second, team members had to wait till the run was complete to download data and begin the crucial post run analysis. The North American Eagle™ partnership with Tropos® Networks, Topcon GPS, Larson Davis, Falcon® Electric, Intel, and PCB Piezotronics provides us the ability to reduce our cycle time between runs, plus increases driver, vehicle and spectator safety by enabling us real time operation. Ed, Chris and John made great progress on our parachute deployment system. They have been working months creating a robust system to deploy the two high speed parachutes provided by Thomas Aerospace and Aerial Machine and Tool. The Thomas Aerospace parachutes can be deployed at near record run speeds, whereas the Aerial Machine and Tool chutes can be deployed at 650 mph and below. Both parachute systems will be thoroughly tested in our next mid-range test runs. For low speed parachutes ( < 350 mph), the team will use the proven system developed by the late Ed Drumheller II and parachutes provided by Waldo Stakes. A very special thanks this week to Western Fire & Safety for providing an AFFF (pronounced A Triple F ) foam dispersal nozzle. Bernard and Von nearly finished assembling our third AFFF Fire Retardant Foam unit. All three units can dispense 150 gallons of the fire suppression foam. Our sponsors NW Sport Divers, Western Fire & Safety , Central Welding Supply, and McVay's Mobile Welding supplied all the components to manufacture the very effective fire suppression systems that are the best for fighting Jet A Fuel fires. We can't thank these teams enough for providing the ultimate in fire suppression. Northwest Sports Divers provides high pressure regulators and scuba bottles: Western Fire & Safety hydro tested all of our high pressure scuba and scba bottles. They also provide fittings, hoses and AFFF foam nozzle units. Central Welding Supply besides providing the welders and consumables, arrange for the team to get three identical 150 gallon vertical pressure vessels to store the fire retardant. Our fire fighters Sean Rondestvedt, Mark Seguin, Eric Helpenstell, Rob Martinson and Von Armstrong place their lives on the line to provide protection for Ed and the Team. We can't thank our fire suppression sponsors enough for keeping us safe.
Expanded New Sponsor Team North American Eagle ™ is pleased to announce a greater participation by computer company Lenovo. The team will be using their top of the line W700 ThinkPads for mobile engineering solutions. The W700 has a secondary screen that pops out of the side giving a 39% larger viewing area. It is simply amazing! No other laptop on the market today can compare. For your computer aficionados' it has lightning-fast Intel® Core™ 2 Duo technology, advance NVIDIA® Quadro® FX MSM based graphics making this the ultimate in mobile workstations. It also has a built in palm rest digitizer and pen. The 120cm x 80cm Wacom® palm-rest digitizer and pen is ideal for digital content creation and CAD/CAM applications. It also has an Integrated Fingerprint Reader and 32-byte pre-boot password protection to help guard against external threats. We can't imagine a company out there doing engineering and graphics would buy anything else.
This weekend Tim did a photo shoot of the W700 with the Eagle. In the upcoming weeks we will be loading the system with quality software from Microsoft, Dassault Systèmes CATIA V5 and Geomagic Studio. We will have it on display at Geomagic Convergence 2009 at the end of the month and this year's COE event in April. In the future the team will have dedicated units for our Topcon GPS positioning system, Tropos® Networks and of course our engineering team. Lenovo's ThinkStations are the work horse for the North American Eagle's engineering team. With Dassault Systèmes CATIA V5 and Geomagic Studio loaded, along with Microsoft's Office Suite we now can go mobile and show sponsors, vendors and audiences the power of the engineering needed to build the world's fastest automobile. Upcoming Speaking Engagements Ed, Steve and Keith will be speaking at the Seattle Museum of Flight at the Puget Sound Materials Expo. This is event is being hosted by the Seattle Chapter of SAMPE (Society for The Advancement of Material and Process Engineering ) . Following the show, Ed and Keith will hop on a plane to Savannah Georgia and give a presentation to Convergence 2009 Geomagic Conference. The two will present how Team North American Eagle uses innovation to build the world's most complex and fastest car. In April Ed, Steve and Keith will present at COE 2009 Annual PLM Conference & TechniFair Seattle, WA April 19 - 22, 2009 We invite you to add a comment, or remark, about our program or the site. Interested in helping us make history and bring the record back to North America? Here's how!
THIS SITE DOES NOT USE "COOKIES". THIS SITE MAINTAINED Copyright 1996 - 2011 E&D Services, North American Eagle, Inc. All rights reserved. |