Eagle's Lair
Members Roster

May 17, 2008

Ladies and Gentlemen:

Photos by Tim Finley

On the hottest day of the year, and probably our one day of summer, Team North American Eagle™ consisting of John Winchester, Omar Chramosta, Jon Higley, Tom and Rich Pengelley, Bill Eckberg, Tim Finley, Von Armstrong, Gino Sanfillipo, John Drury, Keith Zanghi and Ed Shadle assembled once more to work on the next world land speed record challenger.

Today's special guests were the SSR Fanatics car club.  Club members traveled from Oregon, Washington and Canada to get a tour of the Eagle.   Ed spoke to the crowd and later everyone walked around the car as the rest of the team answered individual questions.  May has been a very busy month for tours: The Lotus Club, The Boy Scouts of America and now the SSR Fanatics Car Club.  If this continues the team will be looking to buy a used Universal Studios tram!

After the fun it was time to work and Bill and John finished up a project that was started a few weeks ago.  The two raised the windshield to match the forward edge of the canopy by shimming the lower edge of the windshield.  The process went well and now the two pieces match perfectly.

Rich applied some expanding foam in some compartments that are no longer needed to prevent accumulation of dirt.  Ed and John Winchester finished up our  Thomas, Winchester, McClain and Shadle Engineering parachute system.  Next week we’ll do a functional test and film it with the Olympus iSPEED HG video camera system.

Tim verified the circuitry on the Topcon GPS  with the PCB Piezotronics data acquisition system.   Keith and Tim worked on the camera housing for the Ecliptic Enterprises RocketCam™ onboard cameras.  We have a new smaller design that we are getting ready for use.

Always thinking out of the box, Ed placed a set of small block Chevrolet headers along side the car and dreamed of setting a record for jet aircraft class at Bonneville.  The only explanation we can give, is it might have something to do with the 90 degree weather.

Special thanks this week goes out to Signs By Tomorrow in Houston South for printing up a bunch of new decals in time for our CBS News television shoot last weekend.

We would like to welcome our new sponsor LENOVO.  They are a leader in personal computing industry.  They will be furnishing Lenovo ThinkStations and other hardware solutions to complement our Dassault Systèmes CATIA V5 Software, Verisurf Software, FARO Technologies and INCAT.

Next week look for announcements for two new sponsors.  Things are heating up as we enter summer and as we get closer to our goal to break the 763 mph world land speed record for automobiles!

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