New Set(s) of Wheels

Since we’re building 10 new instruments, we’ve made a number of small investments to make building them easier and faster. This was a fun one to share:

On the left, you’ll see an off-the-shelf appliance dolly. Cheap and easy to obtain, but it only allows access to the wiring area in the instrument base with the panels removed and with the dolly somewhat awkwardly interfering with said access. On the right, we’ve machined custom aluminum “legs” with casters, so the bottom panels can stay on and even be opened or closed as necessary. The machining took a couple of hours, however, so we’ll be testing both side-by-side, to see which fits the need better–or maybe both are good for slightly different purposes or phases of construction!

For reference on our development process, we’re including XKCD’s study of tool making below (“automation” in programming-speak). 😉