[Reconnect the broken black wire, and away we go! After several days of looking, the cause of the trouble proved to be a broken lead on a thermocouple line. On to debugging the vacuum system!

Laser robot making wooden robots for an aluminum robot that makes brass robots… #slavetothemachines

["Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing." –A. Lincoln  

Happy Holidays! Here is a 2mm stainless steel screw. It’s sitting on a standard, non-shrunken quarter for scale. [This screw is just 2mm across, and is about as long as the LIBERTY on a quarter. Here …

Meryl was a little disheveled when she arrived at the shop. She had been in storage for a few years, and while mostly complete, she looked a little ragged around the edges. [Where do all those wires g…

I recently became the proud owner of a couple of discarded JEOL scanning electron microscopes. The big one (“Milly“) is a JSM-6320F from the early 1990s. The little one (“Meryl“) is a JSM-5600 from th…

Big thanks to everyone who helped me lug this beast into the shop last night. For something called a “microscope”, you’d think it would be tiny…