The gauges were fouled at the end of the test. These are still shiny.
Hi Alan. If by gauges you mean the 4 sight glasses visible on the left edge of the setup then I would say that only the bottom one (i.e., the one for BF4) is clan and shiny. The others are range from dirty to filthy. Barry West talks about how they had to sometimes remove them and clean them out because they became choked with rusty sediment.
The bottom one is also lacking a meniscus as far as I can see. It should be visible in such a clean sight glass.
The caption says "after b4 alteration".
That is my label. I created this particular version of Ahlfor's image when Engineer48 and I were mapping out the plumbing of the system. This was part of a sequence of photos showing the various states of the system. In this particular photo one can see that the original white insulation around the pipe leading from the pumps to BF4 has been removed and the pipes have been rearranged so that BF4 is no longer connected to the system drain (the vertical uninsulated pipe at the extreme left). This same rearrangement is still visible in a photo taken by Smith during his tour of the Doral facility in 2017, more than a year after the test ended. The rearrangement was therefore permanent once it was made.
Because of the rearrangement, and because of the clean sight glass with no meniscus showing, I have been assuming that what we are seeing in the image is a non-working BF4 unit ... permanently closed down and dry. I think it was in this state from August 2015 onwards, as reflected in mod October report by Penon. It would be interesting to find out where Alhfors got the image.