View allAll Photos Tagged PrecisionEngineering
Wandering around the empty workshop after hours, I discovered this box of components awaiting cleaning...
How many times have I said these aren't to be piled up like this??? That aside, I rather liked the monochrome look, highlighted as it was by the rich amber of the oil pooled in odd corners.
Heads will still roll tomorrow though...
I thought I'd put all this kind of thing behind me when I left Junior school...
One of today's charming little tasks at work was to fill the engraved lines in these knobs with engraver's wax, a filthy, repetitive job whereby one rubs the wax crayon into the grooves with a finger, leaves it to warm up on a hotplate, then polishes off the surplus.
So, when you next see something with engraved lines on it, think of the poor sap that has to do the 'colouring-in'!
An MDE 330 to be precise...
What else could I use for today's shot other than an assembly called an MDE 330 flexure stage, one of the weird and wonderful things I assemble for a living?!
It's a thingummajig that aligns whatsits in the scientific instrument world...
I've got 25 of these small dovetail slides to assemble for use in a vacuum application, so they - and all their relevant fixings and fastenings - have to be ultrasonically cleaned and dried before use. After cleaning, they mustn't come into contact with my skin or any greasy deposits will cause problems in the vacuum environment, so I have to wear little condoms on my fingers to prevent this!
I'm a sucker for anything shiny, so I grabbed these discs for a photo-op this morning before they went for bead-blasting...
Just WHY anyone would want nasty abraded discs instead of lovely polished ones is beyond me!
Before I'd even got my coat off at work this morning, I was pressed into service as photographer to take some shots of a component that hadn't gone according to plan...
After I'd done the basic 'component-with-a-ruler-for-scale' shots, I indulged myself with a spot of arty-fartiness and played with the effects of the early morning sun shining through the bore of the piece. Unbeknown to me, the Engineering Fairy waved her wand whilst my back was turned, and it wasn't until I uploaded the shots to computer that I noticed the rainbow effect inside...
This is what I've been doing at work this afternoon, and the reason why I now look like Clarence, the cross-eyed lion...
These plastic components are the size of a pinhead with a hole down the middle. Yup - that's it - the white dot on the piece of wire. My task was to remove the surplus material using a scalpel whilst peering at said component through a binocular microscope.
Only another 40 to do...
Okay, so in the game of Flickr tag, I'm supposed to upload the 5th photo from the 5th folder on my computer...
This is it, such as it is - a picture of the components I was assembling at work this week! And yes, it IS the 5th folder because I backed everything up the other day and deleted it from the laptop!
Is it cheating if I tweaked it in Picnik to make it a wee bit more interesting?