Well I told you, this is stuff only for geeks. But I know that their eyes are shining now. A 35 cm thick granite table on pneumatic springs, with a control what automatically pumps air in to the spring if you want to change the horizontal orientation of the table. I was quite speechless.
And the PhD student laughed, and told me, when he arrived here, the table was completely empty, because it was installed that week, so for a few days he had breakfast on the table, so the table is not only for vibration isolation, you can use it as an ordinary table too :).
My theses work is about measuring the vibrations of an end mill. The measurement method will be optical. We will use a laser, and the reflected beam will be collected on a psd a position sensitive diode:
These are the laser and the diode mounted on the machine. And the tricky is, as the geeks already recognized probably, that it is not a milling machine, but a cutting machine. I try to model the milling process on a cutting machine, instead of the work peace we will fix the milling bit, and instead of the knife we will fix the work piece. A matlab code will read the data out of the psd, so we can measure the displacement of the bit. I hope we can try it this week:).
Oh and how do you recognize a real mechanical engineer? He always want to take everything in to its pieces. And how do you recognize a real skilled workman. He is able to assemble what the mechanical engineers take in to pieces :).
If somebody in Budapest sees this, and wants to come to Tucson, these are some of the things, he or she will see for sure.
That was it for today. Good night!
