Hello all, Greetings from Indy,

We reached 700F this morning at 8:30 on the shell!!  We are holding 707F for 16 hours then will ramp down at 50F/hour until tomorrow morning and see how things go. One concern is the 2" thick end plates holding the heat and temperature up. 

The port 4's started to rise with the shell when we got to 670F and we are starting to peel back some of the insulation.  The other ports were being stubborn.  The ports are generally around 290F and we will ease up to 300F so we don't overshoot. All are over 265F, the minimum based on the allowable tolerance, and still rising.  Because we didn't have enough zones to uniquely control all the ports we had to combine a few and put "monitor" thermocouples on them.  The sluggish ones were put onto the remaining few spare zones.   I added the min and max onto the temperature converter (attached) so they can clearly see where they need to be.

We had a scare at 11:30 last night.  One zone controller stuck closed and in 5-10 minutes climbed to 524F while the rest of the shell was at about 314F.  The general area was a patch about 12" wide and 29" long from the tangent of the large radius of port 12 towards the center region between ports 5 and 7.  Fortunately they caught it right away but will document the actual adjacent temperatures and the location with an NCR. 

The vacuum reached 6.4 x 10-5 Torr and is slowly dropping - 4.6 x 10-5 now.  The standard leak, GP gage and turbo are all room temperature.  The elbow above the turbo is up to 100F. 

Joe or Jim, Is there a max housing operating temperature?

The second VVSA has the port 12's on and the domes are being welded.  They report that the tolerance is much better than the first VVSA.  The third VVSA now has been joined with the root pass and being welded up as I write.  Pictures are attached as a zip folder with ".safe" added.  Simply remove the .safe on the end of the file to view the folder. 

Mike