A glowing tribute to CERN craftsmanship

The reputation of CERN's craftsmanship outside the Laboratory just keeps on growing! For the second time in a row, a member of EST Division's Manufacturing Facilities Group has been named France's Top Craftsman.
After Michel Caccioppoli in 1997, Didier Lombard has now taken his place on the roll of honour.
This triennial competition seeks to honour workers and skilled craftspeople in two hundred different trades, from pastry-makers and painters to lacemakers and goldsmiths. To win the medal, competitors must produce an object on the basis of a compulsory specification. 3412 competitors entered this 21st edition of the contest, which covered the period 1997 to 2000. Only 846 of the original entrants eventually presented their work and in the end only 321 were honoured - just two in Didier Lombard's category, metalworking. To be fair, the assignment was an exceptionally difficult one, involving a complex arrangement of stainless steel pipework passing through semi-torus and a truncated steel cone. Working on the basis of a summary description of the finished article, Didier Lombard started by tracing the various components and their intersection points using descriptive geometry. Defining the shape of cut-outs on a flat sheet of metal, which is then formed to produce the required items, is actually one of the most important tasks of a metalworker, and indeed this tracing stage turned out to be an extremely tough proposition.

In particular, tracing the intersection between the semi-cone and the semi-toroid was quite a brain-teaser. 'To start with I thought it would only take me about an hour and a half to solve the problem,' Didier Lombard recalls, 'but it actually took me a month and a half.' He even went as far as calling up his old teachers before finally solving the puzzle after several long nights of perseverance.
Over two years Didier Lombard eventually spent more than 800 hours refining his work of art, outside CERN time, in the evenings and at weekends. His persistence finally paid off when he received the title of France's Top Craftsman on 13 March at the Sorbonne University in Paris in the presence of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, French Minister responsible for Professional Education. The prize-winners were then invited to a reception at the Elysée Palace by French President Jacques Chirac. On 2 April the Préfecture de l'Ain also organised a reception in honour of the Département's nine proud winners.

Didier Lombard's work will be on show in the Main Building near the Users' Office from Monday 9 April.