I Did It!

I spliced a fiber today! Pretty cool.

Splicing fiber happens in three steps. First you use a fiber stripper to strip the cladding off the end of the two pieces you want to splice together. A fiber stripper is a lot like a wire stripper (for stripping the insulation off of electrical wire) except that this stripper has to strip down to 125 microns. Tiny!

Step two involves using a fiber cleaver to make a clean cut on each end, so that you will be joining two very flat surfaces together.

Finally, a fiber splicer aligns the two fiber ends very acurately by computer (remember they are only 125 microns in diameter and they have to be lined up to within a small fraction of that). Once aligned, the splicer melts the ends together, forming one piece of glass fiber. Ideally the join where the ends were melted together is as strong as any other point on the fiber - it was all once melted glass, after all.