[3dem] Moving a microscope

[Wim Hagen]

Hi Ruben,

The one thing many people don’t realize is how to prepare a scope for transport to prevent damage to critical parts. Way too many contractors offer moving stuff, often backed with claims of “we use former FEI personnel”, but what most folks don’t know about are the tricky details of preparing a scope to be moved, these details only are known properly in the TFS factory, even their service procedures don’t describe these details.

Horror story:
TF30 Twin with GIF2002, crate somewhat damaged, tip & tell and all shock indicators (10G) on the crates were ok. But in the factory we always put some tip & tell and shock indicators in some hidden spots on the microscope base: those showed that the scope had been dropped and tipped big time! Some  shipping company employee simply replaced the indicators on the crates with fresh ones....
Tip & tell and shock indicators are standard things that every shipping company has, you can’t trust them on the outside, so make sure the scope itself is tagged with them!

Personally I would heavily heavily heavily push for TFS to prep the move, making sure the local TFS service engineers have been informed/instructed by the TFS factory how to prep a scope for transport.

If I had to move one of my own systems,I would demand a factory engineer to prep the scope. There’s a myth in TEM land to never move a scope but it just boils down to how well things are organized and cutting costs always is a bad idea.

Best,

Wim


> On 13. Aug 2019, at 22:25, Ruben Diaz <pindusito at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi everyone,
> 
> We are moving a high-end microscope (Titan Halo) from one Institute to another which is about 4km away. We already hired the services of a well-reputed company specialized in this sort of job, and they carry some insurance for the move, but very likely it is not enough in case something goes incredibly bad. My question is if anybody has gone through this process, did you get some extra insurance, and if so, for how much? (replacement cost?) Perhaps more importantly, did something bad happen during the move that ended up needing an insurance claim? (column dropped from a truck or something like that). Any horror histories would be welcome!
> 
> Ruben.
> 
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