Grand Finale

Yesterday was a big day for my lab group. As the last day of lab-shifting to the new building, what was left yesterday were bulky things. I really mean BIG and HEAVY things: optical tables.

Optical tables are tables that designed for doing optical experiments. They are extremely stable, designed to damp any vibrations and shakes that would take place otherwise if using normal tables. Now imagine if you have a light plastic table (children’s playing table), is it stable? Of course not, since you can easily shake and move it! So, one way to achieve the stability is by building the optical tables from solid and heavy materials. (Of course they also use some other measurements to prevent vibration, as by making it ‘float’ using high pressure; but this is not important for what I’m going to talk about). The important thing is that they are MASSIVE.

So here’s the challenge: to shift those tables. There are 3 of them to shift, one is smaller (about 6 or 8 feet long) while the other two are bigger (12 feet long). The smaller one is not interesting, since it can fit to the cargo-lift and transported normally. However, the big ones cannot fit to the elevator. So, guess how they managed to get them out of the building..

They used cranes to haul it from the windows~!!

So here’s how they did that. Firstly, they take down two window panels along with the ‘roof’. Then, using lifting machine, they bring the (wrapped) table to the window, where the cranes had waited standby. The smaller crane is used to pull the table out of the windows, while the bigger one is used to support the table. (To attached the crane hook to the table, one of the worker even needed to sit on top of the almost-floating-in-the-air table! See picture above). Finally, the table was lifted by the big crane, and was put on the truck for transportation.

Of course all of that were done by the professional workers. What we did was only watch (and take pictures =P ) of this amazing grand finale.

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