RE-DESIGNED WING HINGE BEAMS – October 8, 2018

We are going for a one-hundred-pound weight increase with the wing design, as we are finding that you just can’t have enough weight capacity in a flying car! As part of the engineering effort for the weight increase, we re-designed the wing hinge beams to be stronger, and made new ones for the flying prototype.

The two shown above are the long hinge beams. These have a diagonal brace in them as you can see in the image, which creates strength where needed, but allows us to remove a lot of extra material from the beam that is not necessary. That is the beauty of modern engineering design on computers, as you can actually create this part in 3D, work out how it swings along with the wings (to make sure it doesn’t hit anything on the way through), and then take that 3D model and run an analysis on it to see if the size and shape is the best for the material being used.

Above, Chief Builder, Ron Burch is putting a hand finish to the pin connections of the new hinge beams to make sure that they will swing smoothly when the new beams are installed. These parts are very well made by Aloha Machine and Risse Racing in Redmond, Oregon, and needed only very minor tweaking of the bushing surface in order to make them perfect. Perfect is the goal.