Support Bulletins

This page is a repository for Support Bulletins which are issued from time to time to keep customers informed about usage and changes to our instruments. Bulletins may be issued for a variety of reasons:

Such changes can cause confusion for our customers so this page shows support bulletins that have been issued.

Design Changes to T4 Tabletop Tensile Tester, January 2015

Reason: Starting in January 2015, cosmetic design changes have been made to the T4 Tabletop Tensile Tester to improve manufacturability and maintainability.  It also reduces the weight and footprint of the instrument.

Description: The door on the previous design of the T4 system was heavy, bulky and unnecessarily robust. The new design uses a door that is entirely made of acrylic - it is lightweight and entirely transparent. Its dimensions are smaller permitting the design of the T4 body to be shrunk.  In addition, the panels on the T4 body are now mounted on the outside of the frame of the body. In the older design the panels were inserted into slots in the T4 body frame meaning that the body would have to be partly dismantled to gain access to the interior of the body. The new design improves the manufacturability and maintainability of the system - panels are now easily removed.  Overall, the new design is several kilograms lighter than the previous design and its exterior dimensions have decreased by almost 40 mm side-to-side and approximately 20 mm front-to-back.

The footprint for vertical mounting of the body of the T4 system has changed - the front-to-back dimensions of both the body itself and the mounting holes are unchanged but the side-to-side footprint of the body has decreased by 40 mm and the side-to-side separation of the mounting bolt holes has decreased from 204 mm to 164 mm.

Conclusions: Installation and usage of the system is unchanged except that the hole pattern for mounting the T4 body has changed slightly as described above.

Design Changes to TP-2 Two-Point Bend System, December 2014

Reason: Starting in December 2014, the design of the Two-Point Bend System has been changed to rationalize the design and improve manufacturability.

Description: The two electronics cabinets, the "Stepper Motor Drive" (SMD) and the "Bend Control Unit" (BCU) have been combined into a single unit - the "Two-Point Bend System Controller" (BSC).  All front panel controls on the SMD and BCU are reproduced on the front panel of the BSC so that functionality of the equipment is actually unchanged.  All rear panel connectors on the SMD and BCU are reproduced on the rear panel of the BSC, except, of course, that the 25 pin connection between the SMD and BCU is deleted. 

Another change involves the faceplate contact detection cable which connects the translation stage to the BSC (SMD). In the original design one end of this cable was permanently installed on the translation stage, entering a connection box which also accommodates the BNC connector for the acoustic break detection signal. The new design uses a cable with two connectors and one end is not per permanently on the translation stage, but instead pugs in beside the BNC connector. The connector type has been changed from a 3.5 mm 3-circuit jack plug to a 3.5 mm 4-circuit jack plug. Functionality is unchanged from the previous version. Note that the system detects if either end of the contact detection cable is disconnected - this maintains the safety feature that certain functionality in the 2POINT software will not operate if the system does not know whether the faceplates are in contact.

Conclusions: Installation and usage of the system is unchanged except that the contact detect cable now needs to be plugged into the translation stage beside the BNC connector.

"Standard" Tensile Tester Discontinued, December 2014

Reason: The "Standard" Tensile Tester (the original version of our tensile tester) has been discontinued and replaced by the T4 Tabletop Tensile Tester.

Description: The "Standard" Tensile Tester had some undesirable design features - in particular the fiber under test was exposed - this meant the entire instrument needed to be enclosed in order to avoid a safety hazard.  In addition, it was easy to accidentally snag an optical fiber while loading it onto the capstans, which might cause extraneous damage to the fiber.

The old design is now superseded by the T4 Tabletop Tensile Tester which fixes the design issues. The fiber is now entirely enclosed behind a door when under test, and mounting the fiber with the door open presents little chance of accidentally snagging the fiber. The standard configuration of the T4 system applies load to fiber by winding onto a rotating capstan. However, the T4-SLIDE option replaces the rotating capstan by a translating capstan mounted on a slide - this reproduces the functionality of the original system.

Conclusions: The T4 system is superior in all regards to the original "standard" tensile tester. Adding the T4-SLIDE to the T4 system completely reproduces the functionality of the original tester. The T4 system has options (for example the long gauge length option T4-LGL) that provides additional functionality not available in the original tester.

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