A single hair-fraction was the boundary between clockwork perfection and total destruction.
Sub-hair-fraction metrology was an exercise in monastic patience.
Before touching a single tool to the collar, Giles had ordered the entire staging overhead frame washed down with high-purity isopropyl alcohol and sealed beneath an inflatable canvas clean-tent to exclude mesospheric dust and cosmic meteor particulates.
“A single spek of granite dust is twenty hair-fractions in width,” Giles explained to Toby, who was wearing lint-free white cotton gloves over his heat mittens.
“If a piece of dust lands on the seating face, it creates an artificial high spot that throws our feeler gauge readings out by twenty times our allowable limit.”
Toby ran a static-electric dust wand along the polished iron-hard metal surface. He watched the micro-ammeter needle drop to zero.
“Surface is fully clean, Lord Giles,” Toby reported.
“Zero fine dust contamination. The helium cooling shroud is holding the metal at exactly twenty point zero degrees across all four quadrants.”
