Eagle's Lair
Members Roster

February 1, 2008

Ladies & Gentlemen:

Today Ed Shadle, Keith Zanghi, Tim Finley and appearances by John Winchester and Gino Sanfilipo spent nearly 12 hours with our sponsors, FARO® Technologies and Verisurf Software.  Mike Schultz and Barry Young from FARO® Technologies, Inc and Nick Moffitt from Verisurf Software, Inc spent the day digitizing the 56 foot long North American Eagle™.

Last year Mark Flubacher and Jeff Squibbs from FARO®, along with Larry Kuehn from INCAT®, Ernie Husted from Verisurf Software and Mark TenEyck from Dassault Systèmes did the original digitizing of the car in the back parking lot of John Force Racing.

Today the team gathered some more points, concentrating on the vertical stabilizer and inlet area of the car.   All in all there were probably well over a hundred thousand measurements taken during the day!  Using the FARO® Laser Tracker, the team set the machine up in front of the car where it could gather the measurements, and see a tooling ball.

This unique piece of equipment can measure the car using a laser beam. We had the laser tracker set to take measurements every ½ inch.  The laser beam follows the SMR that Barry Young passed along the car.  The SMR is a perfectly round tool, similar to a cue ball, which reflects the laser beam back to the tracker.  All this data was analyzed with the Verisurf Software package.

A big thank you goes out to Tony Morley from Morley Machine Tool Alignment in Puyallup WA who graciously lent us one of his ½ inch SMRs to finish the job.  Although not there in person, Nick was on the phone with Ernie Husted from Verisurf during the day to answer questions on the digital model.   Ernie will now take the data and prepare it for our aerodynamic team of Mike Thoe, Rex Walter and Ron Doll.

This information can now be used for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), Rapid Prototyping, Wind Tunnel Models, Finite Element Analysis (FEA) and Structural Testing using the latest Dassault CATIA V5 Software.

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