Science/Engineering/Technical forums

Hi All,

My background is in machining, fabrication, design & engineering, mostly in the aerospace industry. Awhile back a friend asked for some help with a "simple" project and before long I found myself cobbling together things in my shop to do some sputter coating. That project has since snowballed into my third sputtering chamber and guns, along with my second power supply. Following the tangent I'm on with high vacuum and high voltage has brought me into the world of fusors, ion guns and other interesting things that seems to be a new hobby (like I really needed another one, but how can I pass it up). It's slow going, but I'm in the process of building a fusor. Although it's of the spherical variety, the design has been tweaked based on the interesting results from Doug's cylindrical fusor.

I don't have have much to offer the forum at this point, unless it's in machining and fabrication, so I'm mostly here to learn.

Welcome Joe!

Vacuum deposition is one of the topics several of us are interested in. JohnF does ion implantation at his shop (along with other things). I've done a very little evap and sputtering in mine.

There are some uses for both in nuclear (fusor) work, as well as just having some fun with making pretty things (helps with the wife letting us have all this junk to play with).
For example, one issue with fusors is sputtering of the grid when you don't want that, so evaporating a coating that doesn't sputter can be good, as well as a coating with high electron work function so they don't emit so many energy wasting electrons.

There are a lot of uses for materials that have different surface than bulk characteristics. For example, I recently improved one of my homebrew feedthroughs quite a lot via anodizing the aluminum conductor rod (anodize is a good insulator and prevents large peak currents concentrated on one spot).

Jerry is working on a sputtering setup as well, and does a lot of machining of things (as do I, but my shop is not up to the level his is -- check a few of his posts). For example, my current best grid is made from tunsgten TIG rods (.040) supported in pure graphite end caps, precision machined to get even rod spacing for a better central focus. Fusors (and related things) use quite a lot of custom fabrication to work, you really wind up having to be a renaissance man to get results that lead the field -- if it were easy, lesser skilled or flexible people would do it better than we do...my next grid might be narrow vanes of alumina with conductive parts selectively sputtered or evap'ed on to it, to get better tolerances and better control of the E field shape.

To all the new guys -- some pix of your setups would go nice here. We all like to admire neat things!