BW March 2018

3/2: I ran one test in the morning on bundle 401, but the graphs did not look right. I talked with Jim about that, and he said we should ask Dr. Jones. We did not have a chance to address the issue.

I polished the bundle of sci-fis with 1000 grit until I decided I had gone on long enough, really too long, and it was time to change to 5 micron grit. I was consistently measuring a length around 0.798", which is acceptable since the goal is a length of 0.787" +/- 0.039". For the next bundle of sci-fis I will polish away more with the 400 grit. Maybe I should start using the 1000 grit when I am 0.012" from the goal of 0.787".

I polished one end of the bundle with 5 micron grit and started on the other end.

3/5: I ran one test this morning but after that the tests wouldn't complete. Jim said I should ask Dr. Jones whether the problem from Friday was solved before doing more tests. Dr. Jones said we could accept the data after run 1391 and did not need to discard runs 1392 or 1393.

He also said unplugging the cable would not fix the problem of runs not completing.

I practiced fusing again. Last month after Jim worked on the splicing unit I couldn't adjust the left pressure regulator. Today I found that if I pulled the knob up, I could twist it easily.

I polished the sci-fi bundle some more. I picked the end that looked better after the 5 micron grit as the fuse end. I will continue polishing the other end with finer grits, but when I get to the copier paper I want to see if that will improve the fuse end as well as the free end.

I helped Andrew Craig get started on polishing and fusing fibers.

I checked the results of runs 1392 to 1396, and the means were within a range of 10 pixels, so I unplugged the electronics, removed the pre-amp boards, and verified which color codes were in which chimneys.