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Metal Fabrication Job for Stanford University’s BICEP3

Posted on May 06, 2014

metal fabrication

Last July, we received a message from a graduate student at Stanford University, who is part of a research team working on the BICEP3 (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) project. The team was searching for a local metal fabrication company that could help them build a laboratory mount for the special telescope that is the main part of the BICEP 3 project. They specifically needed a shop that could take the SolidWorks files (consisting of part and assembly drawings), finish their design by building all of the components and sub-assemblies and then paint and assemble the finished product.

Below are images of the laboratory mount for their telescope that we made, from start to finish. The mount consists of many steel weldments, machined aluminum parts and some off-the-shelf components.

It is around 7 feet tall, with two A-frames that each include a lead screw for height adjustments of the telescope “receiver support” structure.

Metal fabrication spans so many industries and applications. We love being a part of projects like this.

About the BICEP experiments

Observing from the South Pole, this series of experiments aims to discover signatures of Inflation by actually detecting the CGB via its weak imprint as the unique B-mode polarization signature of the CMB, directly probing the Universe at an earlier time than ever before. Each generation represents a large increase in sensitivity to B-mode polarization.

According to their website, BICEP3 will deploy to the Dark Sector Laboratory at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in the 2014-2015 Austral summer season. It will field 2560 detectors operating at 100 GHz.

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