Cable installation - part 1

It's the 4th of July, but no one even noticed for most of the cold & Very Busy day!

Thick frost on the cars & a spectacularly clear sky...

Time to get the fibre cables unspooled & routed up through the pintle bearing.  Here's one of the clamps installed, making sure all the white racing stripes down the cables are orientated in the same way.

The first length of the cable was stretched out through the loading bay & spectrometer room. 

The break-out box & head end, covered by a protective but flexible metal trunk, was supported with a wooden plank.

With the first length of cable unspooled, Joshua could start pushing the cable up through the pintle bearing.

At the same time, the pushers walked the reels forward to keep up.

On the other end of the pintle bearing, about 3m up, the receivers grabbed hold of the plank & helped it upwards.

Then after temporarily removing the plank, they could guid it up & push (Not pull) it out through the mirror truss, towards the front of the structure.

Having used up the available length of unspooled cable, it was time to secure the bottom & top ends to give the guys a chance to unwind another section from the reels.

Then haul more of the length outwards & down onto the telescope floor.

Then rinse & repeat!  If we had a much bigger spectrometer room & loading bay we could've done this in one go, but instead this took multiple iterations - to unspool, attach clamps & then push the next piece up.

This continued until all the cable had been used up.

& the cable had been comfortably laid out around the base of the pier on the first floor.

At the end of each cable strand there's a strain-relief box (SRB) that all the fibres loop through before ending up in the V-groove blocks that get integrated & aligned to form the slit.

Each 370 micron fibre (300 micron core) lives in its own teflon tube, that provides invaluable protection for these vulnerable strands of glass.

Next up it was time to install the frame that mounts on the side of the enclosure to carry the SRBs.  Mike managed to squeeze in on top of the enclosure to drill the necessary holes & quickly realised what a comfortable, peaceful spot that is, high above the chaos.

E10 had to check that he wasn't really taking a nap up there...

Then Eben managed to find himself a high perch too.

While the frame was being installed, Joshua re-arranged all the fibres to prepare to lift the SRBs & relocate them to their new home.

Over to the lifting station...

Heavy & scary to handle, but the SRBs went up without much fuss.

Then the fibres had to be posted through the port in the top corner of the enclosure.

& gingerly received by Sabyasachi on the inside.

Where he set them aside for tomorrow's action.

The SRB lifting & fibre posting process was repeated 3 more times to build up the whole heap...

All those fibres are a fairly terrifying sight, but they're exactly where they all need to be at this stage.

Joshua embodied a non-linear combination of exhaustion & relief by the end of all that.  Spot the PI stealing a vertical power-nap in the background!

Critical job exceedingly well done!  The SRBs are snugly mounted & completely out of harm's way.

Tomorrow we'll continue with the fibre routing up to the tracker, & get going on populating the slit with the V-groove blocks...