C. Gray, G. Moreno, T. Sadecki, B. Weaver
Install of the new yawed septum viewport in HAM 6 went very smoothly today. We utilized 2 of the aligment pins (3/8-16 silver plated screws with the heads lathed down to thread diameter) that Tyler made for us. This made the installation much easier as we had something to take the weight of the 22 kg viewport assembly while installing the mounting flange screws. The septum window accelerometer was reinstalled in the same location it was removed from. First Contact was removed from the inner, HAM 5 side prior to installation, and the outer, HAM 6 side was removed in-chamber after installation and torquing. The center of the viewport aperture was inspected and was deemed free from egregious amounts of particles.
On a related note, this was the first time I had the chance to use the new modular stair system around the HEPIs and can attest that they work much better than the previous iterations of HAM chamber stairs.
Photos to follow.
Is it in somebody's to-do list to add a notion of the alignment pin fixturing to the documentation? Seems like that fixture should be part of the final drawing package. Let me know if a hand is needed with that.
The "alignment" pins were a last minute tool made to help support the weight of this ~ 50 lb piece of hardware. A design improvement would be to reduce the weight by perhaps making it out of aluminum. It is difficult to get two bodies in the chamber for this maneuver and diverted the time of one of our vacuum engineers a full day.
For the record, this is the AS viewport assembly that was removed:
And this is the viewport assembly that was installed earlier this week: