betsy.weaver@LIGO.ORG - posted 12:55, Thursday 09 July 2026 - last comment - 04:44, Friday 10 July 2026(90966)
HAM3 DOORS PUT ON YESTERDAY JUL 8th, 2026
Late entry for VAC - Gerardo, Travis, Jordan, Tyler and Randy put the doors on HAM3 yesterday afternoon. They did -Y first, then +Y. Getting the doors craned over and transferred to the Forklift could only happen at the corner near the TCSy table, so was a tight fit at that transfer point.
These were the last doors to go on for this vent window.
Well done team.
(Travis, Jordan, Tyler, Randy, Richard, Gerardo)
We did not touch the blue cross members.
Doors went on as smooth as they could. The first door -Y side, where the bulky optical lever next to HAM3 adds a degree of difficulty to install the door (maybe more than one degree). Nothing to report, flanges look good on both sides, door and chamber, O-rings have lots of tiny metal shavings incrusted on them, however they did not cross the sealing surface, we opted not to poke at them. We found a small hex key inside the chamber, finders keepers. The second door for +Y side went on good, after we figured the angle of attack for the forklift, we running out of turning room next to this chambers. On this side of the chamber as we were removing the aluminum O-ring protectors a small section of O-ring decided to pop out of its groove around 6 O'clock, when Jordan was working to place the O-ring back in he found a tiny, very tiny metal washer, he grabbed it and we handed it to Richard, we also found a peek wire clamp at the bottom of the chamber (example shown at the bottom of the second photo), that one we just tossed out of the chamber. No issues noted with the flanges on door and chamber. O-rings have similar particulate on them as the O-rings on the -Y door, did not poke at them either.
For both doors we inspected their respective viewports from the inside, we found a viewport with a high density of scratches on the coating, and we decided to remove it and replace it, see entry Travis' entry.
A nice feature that we noticed and made world of difference from previous installations is the enhancement to the cleanroom, it sits a bit taller allowing for good clearance of forklift's mast during the installation of both doors, and we did not have to move the cleanroom.