Starcloud repaired a broken vibration table in one weekend

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 3:02

   testing so this is our vibe table here fun story about this vibe table is we we we were we actually had i'm going to move around here so you can see it um so we couldn't find a vibe table in the u.s that would vibe with a pressure vessel on there in the time we needed and the lead time on new vibe tables is about uh like almost two years now oh no yeah so and it's about 1.5 million dollars for a new vibe table so we actually bought this secondhand broken vibe table for 200 grand and then the team worked all weekend to fix it up um i don't know if you can see maybe we can go around you can see how janky like the amp that we bought for it isn't it all right we have a new entrant on the video so we're here with Ezra Ezra is also a co-founder do you want to give a couple sentences on your background and then we'll talk about the vibe table for sure yeah my name is

2. 3:55

   Ezra Fielding I'm the co-founder and CTO at StarCloud before StarCloud I was with Airbus, designing and building satellites, focusing on large deployable structures, which is a very critical piece of what we're building here. And then before that, I did my PhD in materials engineering. Damn. So yeah, we're standing in front of our Vive table, our very old, very beasting up Vive table. We had to get this on an extremely short lead time.

3. 4:27

   and new vibe tables are you know 26 monthly time over a million dollars and that didn't work for our schedule so the only option available to us and we had to do this test in-house for for various reasons so the only option available to us was to get a secondhand vibe table and this one I can tell you has had a life it is as old as I am it came to us filled with water no and with a horrendous internal leak um so there's very high voltage inside there's um obviously it's vibrating and there's high temperatures and um right in the heart of all of that there was a very large leak which is the reason why the previous owner sold it evidently um so we didn't realize that until we got it in house um you know two days before the test essentially um and so through the weekend like evenings and weekends we had to absolutely hustle to tear this thing down right to the core

4. 5:23

   um repair the leak we had an expert who from um um basically like the the country's experts in vibe tables come and tell us that the repair is is not possible um and uh and we pressed on and um we got it limping along at least um enough to complete our spacecraft level vibe test so do you find this on like facebook marketplace like where do we find old vibe tables yes it tends to be auction houses um yeah surplus auction houses when companies go out of business uh they um they get rid of all their assets and um yeah that's it's a bit of a um yeah there's some diamonds in the rough there for sure um it's not easy to move there's about 60 tons oh my god 16 tons so 16 sorry 16 tons yeah yeah which is uh yeah a bit of a beast it's hefty um and um you know to run just to power this thing we need a generator so we have a very large generator outside i know when

5. 6:23

   i was pulling up i was like oh we're in kind of like a warehouse office park which one could possibly be store cloud probably the one with huge generators outside yeah that's us yeah but yeah i mean this is um when you have extremely tight timelines when you're trying to do new things very quickly you often find yourself in these these kind of situations where you have to get very creative and hustle and basically not take no for an answer and just be incredibly scrappy. And that's our superpower as a startup, I think, is the ability to turn these crazy scenarios around and make a success of them. It's a great point because StarCloud, you guys