Like NBC jinxed all of the ice skaters by praising them just before they fell at the latest Olympics, I spoke too soon about the PUM ITM03 ear.  Just after writing the above alog, Gerardo and I inspected the S4 ear and discovered a large bubble near the corner of the ear.  It had a small fiberous particulate in the bubble.  SOmehow, after monitoring for 2-3 hours, this fiber migrated into the bond.  We had placed a LIGo-approved Vectra Alpha 10 cleanroom wipe over the S4+ear flat for the night in the event a random bug decided to perch, so possibly this added to the particulate.  Da*m.

With Mr. Barton's assistance, we loaded the mass into the ultrasonic cleaner and bathed it in water.  Within 4 minutes the ear came off.  The mass is now reloaded at the wash station and we'll work on the S3 ear we were already prepped for today.

Bubble is shown in far corner of ear in this picture.

Further comment to the events above - Margot and Gerardo found this PUM to be dirtier than normal when they pulled it out of the cake tin many weeks ago.  AT that time, they did a methanol cleaning of the entire mass.  When Gerardo and I were cleaning the flats of this mass, we also noticed that it still seemed dirtier than "normal" - meaning, when rinsing, the water did not run on the surface as we had seen on other flats.  After we performed the standard cleaning of the flat, the water behaved "normally", meaning it clung to the full surface and "sheeted" off.  After we removed the contaminated ear, we recleaned the flat, expanding the surface area getting cleaned to the entire flat, not just the area when the ear gets bonded as is the typical procedure.  We hoped this would remove particulate that was previously closer to the bond area.  During the second ear bond attempt, we also did not cover the bond overnight with an alpha 10 wipe, since we were skeptical of the origin of the fiber which showed up in the bond.