Camilla, Betsy, Oli

We've made some good progress the last couple of days for the BHSS.

Yesterday I moved the four tiny BHSS beam dumps onto the center of the BHSS next to the BHSS optics. I then carefully wrapped up the BHD sled and table optics mounts (who still don't have optics in) to make some more space on the table. Each mount was gently double wrapped individually in foil, with the mounts with black glass being covered with an optics cloth. Then I grouped and wrapped everything into four big packs: sled lens mounts, sled mirror mounts, table lens mounts, and table mirror mounts. These packs were put aside and left a lot more room on the table. Tomorrow we will double bag and label them to get them off the table.

This morning Betsy and I went into the Triples Lab and glued the viton tips to the OMC cradles and the screws, and those are in the oven and will be taken out tomorrow morning.

Yesterday I also discovered that the BHSS Alignment Tooling Plate (D2400074) needed to be helicoiled, so today I helicoiled it and then put it together on the BHSS. After installation, I needed to remove it and the supporting posts (D2400117), and when trying to reinstall the posts I discovered that one had been gouged and I couldn't get the screws in very far. I was able to get a screw in the other post (proving that it wasn't the screw), and then this post also got messed up. I ended up just standing one of the support posts under where it needed to be. The other post was too loose under the tooling plate (we probably need to loosen a couple of the earthquake stops on one side of the BHSS), so Camilla jigged up a washer + longer set screw combo that held onto the plate and the little amount of the post that wasn't messed up.

We turned on the laser and measured the power before and after the fiber. Before the fiber was 4.5mW and directly after was 1.83mW. With this power we did some rough beam alignment and were successfully able to get the beams to the second iris along each path (layout pic). Tomorrow we do fine-tuning.