1. Straw-tubes We have made 4 out of 16 endplate pieces, and checked their accuracy. We have purchased 250 1.6 cm diameter straw tubes. We are getting glue samples. We are prototyping feed throughs We are carrying out gas studies using Garfield.

2. Straw-tubes from Euclid 10000 rpm 10 mil saw to cut the tubes 250 tubes arrived in 1 week at 50 cents each. (High reject rate.) Sample Tubes

3. Straw-tube Chamber Status The four prototype endplates set up with some straws inserted. The Goal is to put a few hundred tubes in, and then instrument 10s of Channels.

4. Feed Through’s Hand making each one.

5. Items under study Conductive epoxies for the straws, looking at both conductivity and gas tightness. Radiation hardness of materials. Gas mixtures for the chamber. Construction techniques.

6. Network Bandwidth Studies We have carried out a number of tests to see the data rates At which we are able to move large amounts of data from JLab to CMU. Currently can get ~70Mbits/second! JLab PSC CMU ESNET OC3 (155Mbit/s) Internet 2 OC48 (2480Mbit/s) GigaBit RAID 100Mbit Will move to OC12 (620Mbit/s) bottleneck Move to GigaBit We can move 1GigaByte of data in ~115 seconds. We can cut this by 2-3 with upgrades.