At Applied Biosystems, I designed housings and internal assemblies for a mass spectrometer. It’s hard to get a sense of scale from the drawings but the flight tube was 4 feet tall and the housing for an x-y table was about 2 feet square and 18 inches tall. Previously, these components were machined out of solid aluminum. I researched companies that were able to manufacture castings for vacuum applications and we switched to that process. Once the castings were removed from the mold, critical areas were precision machined to meet strict tolerance requirements. Using this manufacturing method saved weeks of manufacturing time and reduced manufacturing cost.

Also shown is an example of one of the internal sub assemblies used in the flight tube.