Fred Schuetze (rear) and Duke Beattie design and build a wide range of electronic equipment.

In contrast to the tidy Instruments Shop, every surface in the Electronics Shop is piled with stuff: wires, tools, knobs, dials—endless bits and pieces of metal, plastic, and glass, long since separated from their parent machines.

“It looks like junk,” says Technical Services director Lorie Druffel, “but it’s actually very important junk.”

“You know, campus is a hundred years old, so there’s some equipment out there that’s that old,” says Electronics Shop supervisor Duke Beattie. “We usually have parts for it, as you can tell.”

In the past few months, Beattie and shop members Duncan Vanderwall and Fred Schuetze have repaired a broken wire in a glass condenser that would have cost $600 to replace; an automatic water sampling device that had been shotgunned by vandals; and numerous pieces of old computer equipment.

One of their ongoing tasks is keeping the Instrument Shop humming; since the CNC machines rely on computers, their maintenance requires more than bolt-tightening and an occasional drop of oil.

“We couldn’t do this if we didn’t have electronic back-up,” says machinist John Rutherford. “If you don’t have that, it’s no use buying this [equipment]. If you can’t have anybody to support it, you’re out of luck.”

Beattie and his crew also do a lot of original work, designing and building equipment such as the control panels for Peter Engels’s BEC machine. Beattie opens a drawer of one of three tall filing cabinets in the shop. All three are crammed with neatly labeled file folders, one for every project the shop has made. This week, he’s tracking down the plans for a device that used sensitive microphones, strapped to a tree, to listen to the fluid moving inside the tree. The researcher who commissioned it several years ago is now at the University of California, and wants to make another one of the devices from Beattie’s blueprint.

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