Fort Vancouver visitors can take in more than a century of regional history, thanks to a volunteer whose previous projects could involve much wider perspectives — measured in light years.
As a Columbian story noted Wednesday, retired machine shop owner Jim Bunzey is putting his skills to good use by renovating park benches for the Fort Vancouver National Trust.
A few years ago, his shop played a role in projects that included the Hubble Space Telescope, which helps scientists observe galaxies 55 million light years away.
Bunzey’s machine shop was in Boulder, Colo. Boulder also is the home of Ball Aerospace, a subsidiary of the company that makes Ball jars for home canning. In the 1990s, Ball worked on a repair job for the Hubble Space Telescope. An outer edge of the telescope’s mirror had been ground too flat by a depth roughly equal to one-fiftieth the thickness of a human hair.
Dubbed COSTAR, for Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement, the project featured some optical wizardry. But it also included such basic technology as electrical cables.
Coming to grips
“Ball came to my shop one Friday. They said they forgot to put hand grips on the cables, and the astronauts are coming on Tuesday. They needed three grips for three different size cables. I had a guy work all weekend” on prototypes.
“A week later, they came back and said the astronauts liked them. They wanted three of each kind: one for the flight, one spare and one for the underwater tank” where astronauts trained for the mission.
His shop also made aluminum and steel parts for three Mars rovers.
“There were a lot of satellites, including Deep Impact.” (In that mission, an 816-pound copper-core probe collided with Comet Tempel 1 at a combined speed of 24,000 mph.)
And there’s still more to come, specifically in October 2018.
“The James Webb Space Telescope,” Bunzey said. “Fourteen years ago, we made parts. It still hasn’t launched.”
Off Beat lets members of The Columbian news team step back from our newspaper beats to write the story behind the story, fill in the story or just tell a story.
