Not as sexy as a tall-clock bonnet or anything but needed a jig made for work. And since lately I haven't had much time in the shop, this was a nice diversion.
We support a physics group at the university where I work. They are part of the CERN collaboration. This group is working on characterizing very fine twisted pair (36ga) wires when used for high speed (gigabit) serial communication AND tightly bundled together with a bunch of wire pairs as well as (eventually) being exposed to high-radiation. When it's all done it will be part of the phase II upgrade of the Compact Muon Solenoid collider section of the big ring in Switzerland.
What they wanted was a way of holding several of the individual wire pairs in a bundle at fixed distances from each other to do some baseline characterization. Then they can be bundled, laced and eventually radiated and then tested again. Seems like a lot of work for what should be a well understood thing, wire, but they found in the phase I implementation that there is a relatively high failure rate and not due just to radiation. An experiment is only as good as the data it produces and if you can't get the data out of the experiment, well, that's not good at all!
Used Fusion 360 and my 3d printer to make little spacer slugs with 1mm channels separated by either 1mm or 2mm and some little swing away caps to hold the wires in place. Then did the CAD for a board with 1mm deep recesses spaced 100mm apart, some pilot holes, labeling text and just for the hell of it, the university logo. I used a tool called "Inkscape" to do a conversion from a bitmap (JPG) image of the logo to a vector one for engraving. Didn't take that long and was good practice since I hadn't used Inkscape in a while.
The 1/2" MDF was an offcut from another project. The Shaper Origin handheld CNC was used to knock out all the details except for the edge moulding. That's best done on a router table. The CNC work took about 1.5 hours. It would have been just about 45 minutes if I hadn't added the logo... Three coats of shellac and sanded back to 320 and MDF gets pretty smooth and reasonably durable.
Don't sweat the petty things and don't pet the sweaty things. -- G. Carlin
![[Image: IMG-1275.jpg]](https://i.postimg.cc/4NqZt6Xq/IMG-1275.jpg)
