The TRIUMF Machine shop, located across from the new Stores and Design Office building, opened its doors to senior management for them to witness where the capital investments TRIUMF has made were allocated with regards to the procurement of modern machinery.
Ivor Yhap, the Machine Shop manager, had recently installed two new vertical machining centres (CNC machines) as part of his plan to restructure and modernize the machine shop. In addition a new CNC water-jet cutting machine is due to arrive within the next few weeks to replace the obsolete plasma machine, this machine will revolutionize the way work is planned and expedited.
Modernization of the shop began eight years ago as there was a realization that designs and geometries were getting more sophisticated and complex and manual machines could not be utilized to achieve said designs and geometries. The impact is that components can be manufactured with speed and repetitive accuracy.
The machine shop now boasts six CNC Vertical machining centres, one CNC lathe, one CNC Electrom beam Welder and now one CNC water jet cutting machine. This is in addition to sheet metal, band saws, surface grinder, two new TIG welding machines, one 2-Axis CNC and six manual machines.
The machine shop has two welding areas, a fabrication shop and a clean welding shop the latter where all Electron Beam Welding, soldering, vacuum leak detecting and clean TIG welding is done.
TRIUMF has a steady stream of projects that is supported by the Machine Shop but also supports local industries by contracting out work that is beyond the shop's capacity or if the shop is too busy and cannot meet deadlines.
The Canadian University community also commissions the shop to fabricate their detector components. The Accelerator Division is supported by the shop to perform emergency repairs on their accelerators, diagnostics and target assemblies. However at this time ARIEL'S E-Linac is the chief preoccupation of nearly every machine in the shop.
When Senior Management arrived the Machine Shop was indeed humming with its impressive workload of projects for E-Linac. Every machine was running and every programmer/machinist was heavily involved and focused on the component that was being manufactured.
Management was impressed with the CNC machining and programming skills of the machine shop staff as witnessed by seeing for themselves the true extent and capabilities of this collective group. This was evident by the E-Linac stainless steel diagnostic boxes that was on display and another that was going through the machining process (see photo).
The Machine Shop provides consultation if requested to all user groups with regards to design and manufacturability, as well the machine shop staff interacts between themselves to determine the best and most efficient method of manufacturing components.
The management team left with a greater appreciation of the modernization of the shop and the high skill sets of the staff which is critical to TRIUMF in accomplishing its scientific mission and is befitting of a world class research laboratory.
Thanks to the shop team for the tour: Peter Gorisek, Mike Wicken, Bob Welbourn, Richard Munday, Andy Hird, Tim Goodsell, Clayton Handley, Jim Xu, David Wood, George Sun, Marco Pecchia, Milan Pankovic, Tony Munday, Ken Lee, Roger Huang and Ivor Yhap.
-- by Nigel S. Lockyer, TRIUMF's director