Hi everyone,

My name is Mary Lou Bailey and this is my second summer doing research in physics! I am excited to tell you all about how much fun working in a lab can be. Of course working here, in physics faculty Dr. Mark Sherwin’s lab, requires a lot of hard work and dedication – but that is for another blog post!

My first few weeks working here under the UCLEADS program have been a blast. I started off continuing a project I had been working on over the past academic year. With more time in the summer to really focus on this project, I managed to finish it within the first two weeks of this internship! The majority of this project focused on building different parts for a mechanical line that moves a cart across our optics table, using stepper motors. In order to build these parts, I got to spend a lot of time in the physics machine shop. Let me tell you about the machine shop – it is a blast in there. The student supervisor, Guy, is a lot of fun to work with and be around. Whenever I go up to him with a question about one of the machines, before I can get one word out, he’ll look at me and jokingly say, “alright, what did you break this time?’ In case you were wondering, I haven’t broken anything… yet. Another great thing about the machine shop is the music they play in there. Yeah, the music. In my opinion, they play really interesting heavy rock/borderline metal music (?. I’m pretty mainstream when it comes to music so almost anything outside of Ryan Seacrest’s America’s Top 40 is pretty new to me). Anyway, I think this genre of music really sets the stage for a machine shop.

The machine shop is split into two parts – the student half and the high energy half. Only authorized personnel are allowed in the latter half, which brings me to my next story! One of the pieces for this mechanical line I worked on required an aluminum plate with 55 1/4-20 (screw size) tapped holes. Now, in the student shop, you would tap these holes one by one by hand. It is a very tedious task when you have to do more than 5 holes. So you can imagine my feelings towards doing 11 times that. I began on this task, twisting, untwisting, and pouring some “magic tap” fluid into these holes to help the tap pieces thread smoother. After about 2 holes, Guy came up to me and nonchalantly asked, “want to use a big-boy toy?” I immediately said yes. I followed him into the high energy shop, where many serious faces turned to look at the small but brave girl walk past them. Guy took me to a very cool looking air drill, where he attached my tap screw and turned it on. I quickly tapped through each hole, using this powerful, handy, and convenient drill. Within 5 minutes, a task that was guaranteed to take 2 hours was finished. I blew off the drill, took my tap screw and aluminum plate, and strutted out of there like a pro machinist. All in a day’s work.

And that’s some of what goes on in the physics machine shop! Tune in next week to find out the inside scoop on Free Electron Lasers!