LASERS? – August 6, 2018
After AirVenture, the prototype was shipped 2,000 miles back from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, to Prineville, Oregon. Back in the hangar, Brent Burch (Samson Builder and Quality Control) checked the angle of incidence (angle of the wing relative to the body), and dihedral (wing angle from body to tip of wing).
Most aircraft wings are designed to have positive dihedral, and are higher off the ground at the tip than the wing root near the body. The Switchblade is no different, and the ground clearance to the wing tip is 24″, with the clearance at the wing root being about 11″. Since the prototype was bounced for the nearly 4,000-mile round trip, we felt a check using a laser measuring device was appropriate.
Above, Brent Burch is measuring the wing root height on the passenger side. The laser shoots a level beam that shows up on the tape measure to give accurate vertical measurements, even if the floor is uneven. The laser is shown on a tripod in the lower right of the image.
