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This 800-tonne tool, seen from a novel angle, stands 22 metres tall and can handle a 1,200-tonne subassembly. And it will soon have an identical twin in the Assembly Hall ...

The tools are solidly anchored in the concrete floor of the Assembly Hall. In the foreground is the footing arrangement for the inboard column.

Both tools will be tested with a full-weight dummy load, expected on site in March 2019. Load testing is the final tool qualification activity, allowing operators to verify the tools' ability to accurately adjust the dummy load toroidally and to six degrees of freedom within tolerances of +/- 1 millimetre.

The technician walking along the curved rails gives us a sense of the tool's scale. The first segment of tool #2 has been positioned for installation.

On the floor of the Assembly Hall, across from the SSAT tools, other bespoke handling stations will be installed—for example, for the assembly of the central solenoid.

Specialists are busy installing and precisely aligning the toroidal rail tracks upon which the wings of the giant tool will travel.

All the pieces of the first tool are in place; only hydraulic and electrical connections must be installed. Ahead are functional tests (integrated system tests without the test load), followed by full-load tests.

At a local science fair in October, the younger crowd (all equipped with their ITER backpacks) is especially appreciative of ITER's virtual reality experience.

Beginning with conductor winding and ending—at the other side of the 257-metre-long facility—with final assembly and cold testing, the fabrication of ITER's ring shaped magnets is a precise step-by-step process.

Two spools of niobium-titanium conductor are simultaneously fed onto the winding table to create a double pancake (a double layer of spiralled conductor.) The winding table in the picture is dimensioned for PF5 and PF2. Later, for the two larger coils PF3 and PF4 (24 metres in diameter), it will be expanded.