An effective table top design must incorporate three critical factors: mass, stiffness and damping. Mass ensures that forces applied to the table top will cause minimal displacements. Stiffness raises the table top’s lowest resonance out of the working range and provides a more stable work surface. Damping decays the higher frequency vibration that reaches the top.

TMC provides three basic versions of table tops: stainless steel laminate, CleanTop^® II steel honeycomb, and granite.

Stainless Steel Laminate
The standard TMC top plate is a 2 to 4 in. thick, highly damped, high stiffness lamination of steel plates sandwiched around a lightweight damped core, rigid epoxy-bonded into a seamless stainless steel pan with rounded edges and corners. With their combinations of structural epoxies and visco-elastic adhesives, these tops will not delaminate due to heat, humidity, or aging. TMC laminated tops are recommended for most applications not requiring mounting holes.

Laminated tops are standard on 64 Series TableTop™ Platforms, 65 Series Floor Platforms, and 63-500 and 68-500 Series Lab Tables, and 63-600 ClassOne™ Workstations, and Quiet Island Floor Platforms. They can also be supplied with a plastic top skin laminated onto the stainless steel to make an even more easily cleanable surface. Plastic skins do, however, detract from the ferromagnetic properties of the top and are unsatisfactory for magnetic hold- downs.

Steel Honeycomb CleanTop^® II
Increasingly, researchers are using honeycomb construction tops with their lab tables to facilitate bolt-down mounting of their equipment to a flat and stable work surface. TMC's spill-proof CleanTop^® II is uniquely suited to such applications.

For a complete discussion of CleanTop^® II Optical Tops, see our Optical Tops Section.

Granite Tops
Granite surfaces are standard with 64 Series tabletop platforms. They are available on special order with other isolation systems. The advantages of a granite top are its relatively high mass and stiffness and the potential for being lapped to a precise surface flatness. Granite's non-magnetic nature is useful in some applications.

For small tops, granite is an inexpensive, moderate performance material. In larger sizes, however, granite is more expensive than standard TMC top plates, sacrifices damping, and does not have other desirable features.