What’s It Like to Work in a Machine Shop Underground?
A machine shop housed a mile below the surface is a very unusual workplace, especially when it has to operate in a cleanroom environment. It’s the only way to make parts that are not affected by cosmic rays. Conditions in another shop underground are rather normal, but being in a cave has advantages for this shop, too.
Whitewashed cave walls and no windows set apart the machining areas of this underground shop in Missouri.
A machine shop housed a mile below the surface is a very unusual workplace, especially when it has to operate in a cleanroom environment. It’s the only way to make parts that are not affected by cosmic rays. The mile-deep shop is part of the Sanford Lab in Lead, South Dakota, where the Majorana Demonstrator explores the physics of material decay processes. You can read about what it’s like working in this shop here.
In another underground shop, conditions are rather normal despite being located in a cave. Yet, this has its own advantage. Brunson Instrument Co. has its production facility in cave near Kansas City, Missouri. The hillside cave location provides a vibration-free, temperature-stable space for manufacturing high-precision measurement instruments. Find this shop’s unusual story here.
