Since some of the pressure housings have been pressure tested, I’ve been working on reinstalling the chassises that hold all the electronics. It’s better to pressure test the housings without the electronics just in case there is a leak but this means I have to wait for the pressure tests to finish before I can work on the chassises. This kinda bottlenecks my workflow, but this week I was able to reinstall 2 chassises. I took them apart 3 months ago but I still remember how the process went. It’s actually easier to put everything back together; when I took them apart, the wires did not want to come out of the chassis, but threading them back in is going smoothly. One thing I don’t like dealing with is thermal paste. When the electronics are running, they generate a lot of heat. To deal with this, there are heat pipes running through the chassis that connect to cool plugs outside the housing. This helps conduct heat away from the electronics where it can dissipate in the cold sea water. However, the heat pipes need to be coated in thermal paste to help with this process. Thermal paste is a thick sticky goo that is very difficult to wash off once it’s one. Yet it manages to get everywhere. Working on the wires and end caps around the thermal paste means my arms are covered in it.
The chassis mounted on the end cap. In the front are the wires that are connected to the end cap. They are threaded in the center of the chassis and connect in the middle of the right half of the chassis.
Caught in a moment of victory! A screw had fallen into the chassis and I had to fish it out. Anything dropped in must be recovered in order to prevent any shorts.