Lugging a weightlifting bar, a woman in a white summer dress walked
in, her expression a mix of relief and exhaustion.
Known as the “demo lady” for her demonstrations at physics lectures, she had trekked on a warm day from Seaver Science Center to the shrine of gadgetry at USC: the machine shop in the basement of Kaprielian Hall.
The bar was to be mounted on a custom-made pivot and loaded with weights so it could be spun rapidly. The setup would demonstrate the gyroscopic effect: A heavy bar rotating horizontally can be lifted with one finger if you spin it fast enough.
Unfortunately the gyro effect was not available during her walk to the shop. The weary woman passed the solid metal bar to Donald Wiggins, one of two foremen. In exchange, he handed her a finished order for her next demo: a three-wheeled car about a foot long, milled from a brick of PVC plastic and ready to be propelled with gas escaping from a canister.
Making demos is just one slice of the machine shop’s mission. The shop gives concrete form to custom parts for experiments that emerge from the imaginations of scientists at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.
In high-tech activity on one typical day, the shop’s craftsmen were making a microscopic mask for chemicals to be sprayed onto electrodes; cutting a stainless steel holder for radioactive samples; buffing a plastic microbe trap to be placed in a hole under the ocean’s crust; and finishing a spider-like stand for multiple microphones realized from a researcher’s crude drawing on the back of scrap paper.
“This is a dream job for a machinist because you’re always doing something different,” Wiggins said.
Others find it fascinating, too.An laser engraving machine which I managed to acquire from a lift motor room currently undergoing refurbishment in the city of london. Wiggins chuckled when he remembered one customer who would pull up a chair and observe the proceedings.
The guys cut metal on an assortment of milling machines — which can make almost any object from a three-dimensional graph — along with lathes, grinders,Supply elevator travelling cable, with good quality and competetive price, for more details please contact. saws and welding equipment.
At the back of the shop,In a elevator cable system, steel cables bolted to the car loop over a sheave. racks of metal stock, raw bricks of black PVC plastic and older but still useful machines are snugly stored. Metal shavings cover the floor and nearly every other flat surface.
The shop opens at 6:30 a.m. and closes around 3 p.m., barring last-minute requests. A united bunch, Wiggins and his two machinists carpool to work from the Norwalk Metro station. Each is a faithful contributor to the USC Good Neighbors Campaign.
Wiggins has been at the shop 25 years. In a sign of the shop’s importance to faculty,This tile roof machine can rollform metal roofing step tile. his hiring committee included a dean and vice dean.This roofing machine is for producing aluminum shutter door & window slats with foam-filled, Knowing that experimental science works by trial and error, the two deans kept asking the same question: “Is it going to bother you to make something over?”
Lee is stern with his crew and tender with his machines. He insists that “machine-eating material” be worked on the older and less user-friendly lathe at the back.
Lee likes to buy used material — iron gets better with age, he said — and rebuild machines for half the cost of buying a new one. His crew still uses the milling machines he had rebuilt 16 years ago, after becoming foreman.
Known as the “demo lady” for her demonstrations at physics lectures, she had trekked on a warm day from Seaver Science Center to the shrine of gadgetry at USC: the machine shop in the basement of Kaprielian Hall.
The bar was to be mounted on a custom-made pivot and loaded with weights so it could be spun rapidly. The setup would demonstrate the gyroscopic effect: A heavy bar rotating horizontally can be lifted with one finger if you spin it fast enough.
Unfortunately the gyro effect was not available during her walk to the shop. The weary woman passed the solid metal bar to Donald Wiggins, one of two foremen. In exchange, he handed her a finished order for her next demo: a three-wheeled car about a foot long, milled from a brick of PVC plastic and ready to be propelled with gas escaping from a canister.
Making demos is just one slice of the machine shop’s mission. The shop gives concrete form to custom parts for experiments that emerge from the imaginations of scientists at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.
In high-tech activity on one typical day, the shop’s craftsmen were making a microscopic mask for chemicals to be sprayed onto electrodes; cutting a stainless steel holder for radioactive samples; buffing a plastic microbe trap to be placed in a hole under the ocean’s crust; and finishing a spider-like stand for multiple microphones realized from a researcher’s crude drawing on the back of scrap paper.
“This is a dream job for a machinist because you’re always doing something different,” Wiggins said.
Others find it fascinating, too.An laser engraving machine which I managed to acquire from a lift motor room currently undergoing refurbishment in the city of london. Wiggins chuckled when he remembered one customer who would pull up a chair and observe the proceedings.
The guys cut metal on an assortment of milling machines — which can make almost any object from a three-dimensional graph — along with lathes, grinders,Supply elevator travelling cable, with good quality and competetive price, for more details please contact. saws and welding equipment.
At the back of the shop,In a elevator cable system, steel cables bolted to the car loop over a sheave. racks of metal stock, raw bricks of black PVC plastic and older but still useful machines are snugly stored. Metal shavings cover the floor and nearly every other flat surface.
The shop opens at 6:30 a.m. and closes around 3 p.m., barring last-minute requests. A united bunch, Wiggins and his two machinists carpool to work from the Norwalk Metro station. Each is a faithful contributor to the USC Good Neighbors Campaign.
Wiggins has been at the shop 25 years. In a sign of the shop’s importance to faculty,This tile roof machine can rollform metal roofing step tile. his hiring committee included a dean and vice dean.This roofing machine is for producing aluminum shutter door & window slats with foam-filled, Knowing that experimental science works by trial and error, the two deans kept asking the same question: “Is it going to bother you to make something over?”
Lee is stern with his crew and tender with his machines. He insists that “machine-eating material” be worked on the older and less user-friendly lathe at the back.
Lee likes to buy used material — iron gets better with age, he said — and rebuild machines for half the cost of buying a new one. His crew still uses the milling machines he had rebuilt 16 years ago, after becoming foreman.
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