Metalcraft specialises in the design, manufacture, testing and finishing of equipment for use in vacuum and cryogenic (extreme low-temperature) applications. It purchased the tracker for inspection and pinpoint measurement of one of its main products, inertia tubes.
While the product itself may be too specialised to grab the public imagination, the tubes are an essential component for the massive new particle accelerator – the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – currently being built near Geneva by the world’s largest particle physics research centre, CERN. The tubes are a key component for the cold masses of the quadrupole magnets being built as part of the CERN project.
As with any project it involves itself in, Metalcraft weighed up all the options before selecting the most appropriate equipment and methodology – a 200-year-plus reputation for quality engineering is not something you want to throw away overnight (see box 2). But Leica did not let them down – quite the contrary…
Project manager John Tadman sums up the feelings of his colleagues: “Leica knocks spots off the competition. The system is a ‘spot-on’ solution for Metalcraft.”
Design engineer and current key user Dean Lenton couldn’t agree more. Within weeks of getting his hands on the space-age measurement system, he was already discovering a host of new uses for it, over and above its original purpose. Says Dean: “The possibilities for this system are endless.”
