How-To Guide

12 03 2009

Nothing like finding a how to guide for your crazy project!





Vacuum Chamber Landed

12 03 2009

Received the vacuum chamber today. First of all, it’s huge. Way bigger than I imagined. I could easily fit inside it!

 

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When we took off one of the top ports we found this:

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After some further poking around, we realized what this chamber was originally for: depositing metal on Compact Disks! The CDs would go on those spindles, and everything spins around. 

So we need to take the top off to get into a position where we can remove all these guts. Fortunately, we have  a 1 ton crane laying around!

 

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Stuart checks out the machinery:

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And now we have an empty chamber:img_3317

The walls of the chamber are actually pretty clean, they were largely protected from the deposition material by all the sheet-metal installed inside. However as you can see from the colors, there is deposition residue here and there. Also some flakey deposition scaling. So at the very least it will need a good cleaning.

The gaskets are rubber, so this chamber is not intended for ultra high vacuum:

rubber_gaskets

And most of the ports are secured with specialty screws, I think they need this wrench:

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