On April 12 through 14, Shawn Callahan, Tom Hoffman and J.T. Williams visited the Avon Bearing shop in Cleveland, Ohio, to perform acceptance tests on the instrument rotator bearing. The tests showed that the bearing is well within all critical specifications. It turns with substantially less than the maximum allowed breakaway and running torques. The Heidenhein strip encoder was mounted without any difficulty. The bearing will be packed up and delivered to the MMT in late April, 1999.

Images courtesy of S. Callahan.

• The assembled bearing is lifted with the shop crane.
• The bearing roller retainers are visible on the inside surface of the race.
• The bearing is turned by manpower while the rollers are individually installed.
• The happy engineers. Shawn is leaning on the I-beam that allowed the bending stiffness of the bearing to be measured.
• The Heidenhein tape is installed