Yesterday a major advance forward happened. My vacuum chamber’s vent valve finally arrived last week, so I was able to test the chamber out safely. About three hours in, the vacuum had already arrived at 5 mtorr. It worked great!

It’s probably time for a little introduction. Here’s the chamber:

Cryogenic Associates built it a while back. It’s about four feet tall and just under 14 inches in diameter. I got a laugh because there is a “Property of NASA” sticker on it. Anyway, the lid you see above turned out to be a little funky, so John from JW Machine built me a new one. Highly recommended.

Regardless, this is the setup I presently have in my basement:

The pump is hiding behind that console with the gauge on it, and is a Pfeiffer Duo 2.5M. Just after shutting the pump off, again after three hours, this was the reading:

What this means is that I finally have a good environment to test my idea in, so I can finally begin worrying about the testbed more than the test environment!