Blog Post

Did You Know, Invacua are in Space!

Brian • Jul 06, 2020

Planck Space Craft

A few years back Invacua brazed together a copper bracket which was used to hold sensitive equipment on the Plank spacecraft.

Planck was Europe's first mission to study the Cosmic Microwave Background, the relic radiation from the Big Bang, which occurred about 14 thousand million years ago.

The mission had a wide variety of scientific aims, including: [5]

Plank made it's last communication with earth on the 23rd October 2013.

Where is it now?

Planck now orbits the second Lagrange point of our Earth-sun system, about 1.5 million km (930,000 miles) away.



by Brian 22 Jun, 2020
12 years since the last issue of the engineering magazine was published. The falling manufacturing base in the UK industry meant the magazine began to struggle – the manufacturing print magazine market was falling, so the decision was for the September 2008 issue to be the the final print issue. We dug this issue out of the filling cabinet when tidying up. On the front is a picture of Invacua's Brian performing some vacuum brazing. Here is an extract from inside this issue: Pop goes the rivet New addition to tuckers 'POP' nut range - in the six sided shape of the 'POP' hexa nut - extends the ability to provide threaded inserts with resistance to high torque stresses. In certain materials and situation it can be difficult to prevent high torque stresses being placed on the threaded insert - stresses which can, in the extreme, cause the insert to rotate. The new 'POP' hexa nut is set in a pre-punched hexagonal hole and can be inserted either before or after plating or painting and offers an exceptionally high torque to turn value. Key feature of 'POP' hexa nuts is their thread strength which ranges up to 27.4 NM according to the size and material. Body shear strength ranges from 1.67 Kn to 5.3 Kn and thread tensile strength from 4.9 Kn 225.5 Kn.
by Brian 06 Jun, 2020
Great article here from AZO material describing the benefits of induction brazing over flame or vacuum brazing https://www.azom.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=13360
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