The college is fortunate to have a well equipped Instrument Shop. This unit is primarily engaged in support of faculty and graduate student research, but devotes appreciable effort to devising special teaching lab and clincal accessories as well as maintenance of mechanical equipment of all descriptions from classrooms and clinics.
The shop occupies about 850 square feet on the third floor, and contains most of the usual machine equipment; additionally it is equipped with special tools to handle various optics.
The largest portion of the machine work is done on one of two Bridgeport milling machines. A DoAll 10x36 engine lathe is equipped with a TurnVision programmable readout system. There is also a DoAll 15" drill press, floor model. The shop uses a Powermatic 22" bandsaw for most work, a 12" bandsaw usually setup for steel cutting, and a Lincoln cutoff bandsaw for long sections. Tool grinding is done on a Baldor pedestal offhand grinder or a Baldor protractor set pedestal machine. A Hoover wet diamond wheel is used for fine edges, and even optical glass.
The special optical equipment includes a specially modified pattern edger (WECO) capable now of windows as small as 12 mm or as large as 80 mm. Additionally there is a diamond wire saw (LaserTech) which is used for cutting arbitrary patterns from optics; the kerf is only 0.010". A small general purpose vacuum system (Varian VE-10) is available, and used partly for deposition of reflective surfaces on special mirrors. The shop also contains an "inherited" contact lens lathe and polishing machine. These are used for making optical mold inserts for the molded optics which are regularly produced.
A recent addition to the shop facility has been the upgrading of the older Bridgeport mill to full three-axis CNC control. This allows us to make parts that 
were extremely difficult by the old means. The first project from the 'new' machine was a set of four-position Geneva escapements.
Small scale sheet metal work is handled by a DiAcro 24" shear and finger brake. A Tennsmith 6" notcher and a small arbor press are also on hand. To increase the flexibility of the machine tools, the shop has a respectable array of accessory tools. A 6" indexing head and a 12" rotary table are available for use on the mills, and the lathe may be set up with a 3 jaw universal, 4 jaw independent, or rubberflex collet chuck, or with a 5C collet nose with lever drawbar. Also available for the lathe is a Holdridge radii cutter of 4" diameter capacity; this has been used for building integrating spheres. The machine shop also has a reasonable assortment of gauging, layout, and setup equipment. A granite surface plate (30x36") and an 18" digital height gauge are supplemented by an 8x8" sine plate and gauge blocks, assorted angle plates and blocks. A Gaertner X-Y comparator/microscope sees occasional duty. The usual assortment of micrometers, calipers and gauges is also available. A small gas welding rig is also occasionally used.
Recently, several of the projects to come through the Instrument Shop have been requests for multiple "copies" of the same item. In order to deliver these items in a timely manner, we have turned to small-scale molding of components. Molding is typically done from urethane resin in molds made usually of silicone rubber. Most of the process has been worked out by trial and error. We have succeeded to make highly precise multiple replicas which can be assembled interchangeably.
Another acquisition is a solid object printer: a computer peripheral which creates physical objects by material accretion. This is extremely useful for fabricating arbitrary complex shapes. These are then used to make the molds for producing the plastic parts.
The shop maintains a reasonable stock of material, components and fasteners, and many projects are accomplished without special ordering.
