Friday, April 1, 2011

Day 3, 04/01/11 -- Tragedy

This is not good.

We needed to move something out of the way (the 150 lb flat bottom lid used when transporting our cryostat) so we foolishly decided to use the crane ourselves. After we had lifted the lid and as we started moving it to the other end of the high bay, the tag line for controlling the load broke and the lid swung over and hit the instrument.

It ended up putting a crack in one of the thin-walled tubes in our so-called "helium-10" fridge, which subsequently lost all of its helium charge. On the plus side, it was only helium 4, which isn't nearly as expensive as helium 3. On the minus side, without helium 4, we can't cycle the fridge to get the detectors cold.

This is not a good way to start the month of April.

1 comment:

  1. Oh NO! Why weren't you operating the crane with the new voice activation feature instead??

    ReplyDelete

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