Our piston-cylinder presses (above) are the workhorses of our lab. They allow us to reach experimental pressures up to 30 kilobars: equivalent to a depth of 100 km below Earth's surface. All of our presses were built here at UCLA, except Bob's press, which traveled historic Route 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles in the back of a U-Haul. Three of our five presses are about seven feet tall and weigh more than a Volkswagen. We pressurize them using noisy hydraulic oil pumps, each of which has its own distinctive "song".

At left is our utility press, the Enerpac, which we use almost daily. Though not nearly as powerful or imposing as the others, it's got loads of character and is the only press in the lab with bulletproof plexiglass shielding! Besides pressing salt parts--a common job for undergraduates--we use the Enerpac to extract pressurized capsule assemblies after an experiment. The recording at left captures one of the more exciting events in our lab: the moment when an assembly is extracted from its casing, ready to be dissected and mined for data. The compression starts out smoothly, with the Enerpac ram pumping steadily onto the obstinate assembly. Eventually the pressure is too great and the assembly whines out of its core, climaxing with the crash of the piston and assembly together into the cardboard box below. OK, it's not exactly Hitchcock, but we do live in L.A. and what we really want to do is direct.