A. Bell, J. Oberling, T. Sadecki, D. Sellers

Today we successfully welded the first two fibers into the new ETMy monolithic.  Some tooling readjustment was necessary as we switched sides of the suspension (not unusual, just a bit larger in magnitude than we usually see) which caused us to waste a fiber.  Another fiber broke poorly as we were scribing off the fuse ends and was thus scrapped.  These 2 fibers constituted one 'set' for a particular corner of the suspension, and due to the new violin mode grouping scheme, caused us to have to scramble back to the pulling lab to collect of new corner 'set'. 

For future reference, the time consumption of the new VM grouping scheme is rather high.  Since the fibers are matched, we can no longer simply pick another fiber that meets the looser requirements for fiber profile, but must recalculate the pitch contribution of another 'set' of fibers with respect to the already installed fibers and hope that we have fibers in the cabinet that meet our needs.  From the fiber pulling side, Karl Toland from Glasgow has been here for 3 weeks pulling and profiling fibers for the remaining 3 ETM replacement (1 more at LHO and both at LLO) and is still working toward that end (i.e. he is not done yet).