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| Aluminizing |
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| This is a picture of my vacuum chamber- aluminizing setup. The chamber is 10" inside diameter. The system uses three pumps, the roughing pump is on the floor to the right of the stand.The backing pump is mounted at the bottom of the stand and the diffusion pump is mounted to a valve at the base of the chamber. The roughing pump removes the bulk of the air from the chamber. the backing pump connects to the diffusion pump and removes air molecules from the diffusion pump, the diffusion pump cannot operate without the backing pump. The glow seen to the right of the stand is the Bayard Alpert guage tube that measures the high vacuum in the chamber |
| This is the vacuum guage controller. The guages at the left of the controller measure low vacuum. Once the low vacuum guage reads 0 the high vacuum guage can be turned on. The high vacuum guage is the red led's to the right. once it reads 10 -5, I am ready to coat. |
| This is a 3" mirror that I stripped the coating off with Ferric chloride. The mirror is suspended upside down over the filliment. There are 3 pieces of pure aluminum hanging on the filliment. When the propper vacuum is reached the filliment is powered up with 3.5 volts at about 40 amps. the filliment absorbs the aluminum and dissapates onto anything in view of it. Notice the shadows caused by the studs. |
| After the power has been applied to the filliment for about 20 seconds, a valve is closed between the chamber and the diffusion pump and air is let back into the chamber. Once the chamber is back at atmospheric pressure the chamber is opened This picture shows the coated mirror. Note the filliment in the background is coated with aluminum and you can see the shadow caused by the filliment mounting stud. |
| This is the first attempt at coating I tried it is just a small glass I bought at a dimestore and washed in the dishwasher before coating it |