The week of May 19

In the past week we began several new projects at the HET. One is the Remote Thermal Area. This week that project continues with the contractors from Veliz Construction and BP locating all of our buried water, glycol and lightening protection lines around the back of the facility and starting the trench work for the new lines. This work should continue all week.

The other project is the sealing of the dome louvers. Over the years the brass seals on these louvers have blown off and we have had significant ingress of dust and rain under high winds. We have identified a new adhesive that should keeps those seals on over a much longer time scale. One of our TOs is working on the installation of these seals and based on last weeks work she finds that it takes a full day to install a seal all the way around each louver and there are 4 louvers in each bank. She hopes to be finished by the end of July.

Mirror alignment was begun last week. This is a fairly slow process and we have captured about 70 mirrors into our array and the rest require some by hand alignment, which will be done this week. This is moving along steadily and should be ready by the deadline to stay to schedule… the 2nd week of June.

Last week we made considerable progress in getting the track to run consistently. The source of the metal shavings was located: with the additional weight of the tracker the encoder track deflected and the encoder trolley had to be realigned. We will continue to fine tune the encoder head position as we add more weight to the tracker.

The Constant Force Drive is now operational and can move the track at will in the Y direction. We have repaired the burned out cards but we have not identified the source of that damage. This week we have a few odds and ends to prepare for next week’s 97 point tracking test.

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