†National Optical Astronomy Observatory

In the same way that every telescope has multiple instruments and cameras, an interferometric array like the CHARA Array will have numerous beam combiners at the back end. And like the instruments of a single telescope, each of these combiners will be optimized for a particular kind of observation or scientific program. In this paper we describe the CLASSIC and CLIMB beam combiners of the CHARA Array. Both are open air, aperture plane, wide bandwidth single spectral channel instruments optimized for sensitivity. CLASSIC is the original two beam combiner used for the first science at CHARA, and it still has the faintest magnitude limit. CLIMB is a three beam expansion of CLASSIC that can also provide closure phase measurements