A Little Closer!

This is the casating I wanted to try a bit of evaporation on to. Its made of fastcast polyurethane and then spray-painted with gloss black.As the Al coating has no filling qualities the gloss of the coating is a result of the texture of the base.

 

I picked up a few aluminium prefused tungesten filiments from a company called Midwest Tungsten in the US of A. This is a bit overkill for a DIYer but the were cheap, from their surplus bin!

 

So I hung the plastic part from a wire inside the bell and began to pump down...

When I got to 40micron or so I turned on the MOT power supply.(I wrote this up in the blog a good while ago)

After 20 seconds I got this! I was delighted! Just mechanical pump, no diff. Now, its not up to scratch yet but these little victories help me keep the faith.(Ignore the electrodes poking through, they are just sealing the holes here)

A strange thing at this vacuum is the fact that the back of the part got a covering of Al. as well. It must fly around in the belljar at these crappy vacuum levels.

 There is the front. Opaque but not bright. It has greyness in person. Getting there...

Bell Jars, a rural approach!

I have been working on my new set up for a while now. I've been a bit busy on other projects but I'm gonna try detail some of the bits I've finished.
The first thing is the bell jar. Its made from a 'recorder jar' from a milking parlor.(Thanks again to Mr Hart!) I picked three up at local farmers auction. Cheap too!
As far as I know they were used to keep track of how much milk was being sucked out of the poor cows. We like them because they are made for vacuum use.
This is how they look in their original state. Closed at the top and bottom. An amazing piece of glass.


I went to Ireland's only scientific glass blower(details below) and got him to cut the bottom off one. It was borosilicate, the others seem to be nonpyrex glass. I'm not sure what they are made of.
The good news was that the boroglass one had two openings at the top. Perfect for the sputtering setup I was hoping for. I wanted to isolate the baseplate from the sputtering power supply.(Note: the pump and therefore the baseplate is earthed and that is the same potential as the magnetron, so this makes it not really isolated from the sputtering power supply. I don't know what else to do!)
I believe finger prints can be an issue in high vacuum, I wonder if foot prints are an issue too?!

The name of the scientific glass blowing company is Lab Glass Services. They are in The Grange, Oldtown, North County Dublin. Talk to Colm a very helpful chap! 01 8433442