| McAllister
Technical Services (MTS) was founded in Berkeley, California in 1981. At
that time, most scientific equipment was over-priced and not really flexible
enough to meet science's ever changing needs. From the very first day, our
objective has been to offer the scientific community an alternative to that
inflexibility. Our goal has been to offer top quality, genuinely innovative
scientific equipment, custom devices and gizmos at a fair price. The scientific
community agreed for we have expanded. As we grew, the goal has always been
Service(s), just like the name. |
| Over
the course of the years, we have designed and built innumerable devices
for the scientific community. Robert McAllister has been actively involved
in design and manufacturing since 1963, first as an employee for various
companies including Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and, since 1981, has performed
and directed design and manufacturing for MTS. A representative sample of
products designed and fabricated at MTS can be seen at http://www.mcallister.com.
Please note that all vacuum-exposed surfaces and materials on the devices
shown here are fully UHV-compatible.
For design, we use SolidWorks, the leading 3D solid modeling environment
that fully integrates parts, assemblies, drawings and bills of material.
While there are advantages to the designer using SolidWorks, the real
benefit is to the recipient of the design. Even very complex assemblies
can be easily shared, viewed and queried (disassembled and measured) without
the need to either learn the program or even own a copy.
Among the more unusual projects we have designed and built is a 3-axis
positioner for multiple plasma torches. Another photo can be seen at http://www.mcallister.com/tiltbig.html.
It is a fully motorized 2 axis gimbal with 12” clear ID and a Z-axis
stage is included. All axes were fully motorized and encoded and the Z-axis
had a 30” vertical stroke with a lifting capacity of 600 pounds
at 15 inches per minute.
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| Another interesting project was the design
and fabrication of a Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM) to be incorporated
into an existing MBE growth and surface analysis chamber at a national laboratory.
The challenge was increased by the necessity of maintaining a uniform spacing
between the probe tip and sample of a few Angstroms, even while the rest
of the system was operating. The researcher routinely is able to resolve
individual atoms on 3” Si and GaAs wafers. |
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NIST researchers contracted with us to design
and build two sample translators. One has a vertical travel of 66”
with rotation. Both axes are motorized and encoded. The second was mounted
atop a chamber with 8 different ports arranged in a circle, 45 degrees apart.
It was designed to extend, receive, retract, rotate and then re-extend a
sample, acting as a sort of “railroad roundhouse”. Both the
extend / retract and the rotate motions are actuated from a single rotary
motion feedthrough, conserving space and reducing cost. For comparison,
our price was almost exactly half of our competitor’s |
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MTS also builds smaller devices
for moving, rotating, heating and cooling in vacuum. Shown here is a specimen
holder which includes LN2 cooling, heating and the ability to move the
heater closer to the in situ sample.
Please consider McAllister Technical Services for your
next job. We are confident you will find it both rewarding and easy to
work with us. We enjoy our work and we enjoy the challenge of a new gizmo,
widget or whatever it may be.
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