Another faultless sequence
Although it was "a bit longer than anticipated," the operation was "quite successful, with no show-stopper, no physical mismatching, and no major adjustments required. It all went very smoothly," confirms Chang Ho.
What took time and required almost a full day of delicate tweaking was the "balancing" of the load, once it was detached from the upending tool. Although the whole sequence had been practiced with a dummy load whose weight and general shape was representative of a D-shaped 320-tonne toroidal coil, and although models and calculations had determined the coil's theoretical gravity centre, balancing the load was to prove a long and painstaking process.
By Tuesday 15 June, six days after operations started, TF12 travelled safely into the left wing of tool #1. In two weeks, TF13 (also from Japan) will be placed in the upending tool to later follow the same sequence of operations, this time directly into SSAT-2.
Lessons learned in the present operation will prove priceless. In the course of machine assembly, this very sequence will need to be performed 18 times.