I'm a machinist and you guys did an excellent job. The entire trade is all about creative problem solving and incremental learning. Which are skills you've already demonstrated. All you need now is time. Best of luck in the future and remember: you're ALWAYS going to break taps.

Engineering cut? Yes please! A water-cooled vacuum-compatible high-voltage assembly is definitely interesting enough to warrant one

Those results are sick, and the machining quality top notch bro. Nice work!

For sputtering non conductive materials, like the glow powder, you need RF sputtering. If you try to DC sputter an insulating target charge will build up on it, and will discharge with the arcs you see at 23:08

You don't have to mince words TTE, we already know you're actually a wizard disguising his spells with props.

I have one of these machines in my lab and it costed hundreds of thousands. It is unbelievably crazy that you made one from scratch!

5:45 as functional isolation that nothing important gets zapped, great choice. But don´t rely on that for any kind of safety, just ground the table to the earth as part of the setup wiring. Ideally add a "dummy" wall plug that connects the ground and energises a relay wich prevents the device or power supply from working when not plugged in, somewhat ensuring a good earthing of the contraption. This is because if the metal construction is not connected to anything it can quite easily gain a static charge over time through tracking or by capactiance and give you a nasty zap.

My tips for machining soft metals (copper, tin, lead, etc.) Use sharp HSS tools. Rasor sharp is blunt after i sharpened them. :-) The cutting angles can be quite steep. The tools are more like wood cutting tools. You want to move the removed material away from the stock as fast as possible. Use diesel, kerosene or WD-40 as cutting lubricant. The softer the material the thinner the lubricant has to be.

EDIT: I'd absolutely love to see an engineering cut of this video. Your work is amazing. I know this is too late to be useful, but the sheer majesty of what you built compels me to say that machining copper and some of its alloys is a right bastard, but it is possible to get oxygen-free Alloy 145. Alloy 145 is a tellurium-copper alloy which is ideal for machining. It apparently sees lots of use as a busbar material due to conductivity. Although described as a free machining copper alloy, free machining is, it's still a copper alloy and I found it amazingly abrasive against carbide and HSS tooling, and while less so than pure copper it's still pretty gummy. But it is nicer to machine, and unless the tellurium was somehow an issue I think it'd be great for this application. You've done some beautiful work here. Far out.

Professional Laboratory Machinist here: holy crap thats looks awesome!! Great job!! I personally love the way OFE copper looks! So much more red in person.

Mundane fact: The US doesn't use the Imperial System. We use the US Customary System, which is comprised of "nice" multiples of Metric units to approximate Imperial units. Because of this, Imperial and US Customary units aren't interchangeable or "nicely" convertible.

That is pretty sweet! I've always admired Ben's DIY tools he's built that would otherwise be inaccessible to the average person. Welding cable is also a good choice building high current transformers. With jumper cables you never really know what your going to get.

So, this is basically a plasma coater (common name). The disks for some reason are often called targets - although that makes no sense to me since they are sources. The coatings are typically very thin (in the nm scale). We use them to make conductive surfaces on samples for machines like scanning electron microscope (and others). These machines (generally) require conductive samples. I'm not allowed to "play" at work, but you might try to see if you can get interference colors on a glass slide (e.g. blue or red gold). You can use it as a thickness gauge based on coating time. Also, I always want to use masks and coat successive layers of metals with different conductivity to see if I could make an odd circuit - we can actually do carbon as well. Not sure they make a target for that, it is an evaporation technique usually. Anyway - good job. We pay a rather large sum for our coaters. I think our last carbon coater was 50K and it looks very similar to what you made .

Welcome to the machining! You and Ben have heaps of talent there. Impressive. P.S. If anyone tells you - something you struggle with is easy, 'just do this, simple and failproof' - that person's a pretentious rookie. Metalwork is just unpredictable a lot of the time. You did more materials in 2 weeks, than me in 3 years as a miller(usually harder than turning on CNC). So not gonna splash an advice, it's already here. Takes persistance, ingenuity, logic, imagination and experience from accidents. For people outside machining and physics, you really are magicians. As i just left my job, wish i could join projects like this, while earning a living.

My grandfather was an electroplater. He took my mother's first pair of shoes and plated them in bronze in 1944. The shoes were canvas and leather and are beautiful. We still have the shoes, though mom passed in 2016.

I have a bachelor's degree in metal production and micro-mechanics and you guys have my biggest respect for taking on such a project and building this device. In work I use a lot of PVD coating techniques - but never in my life would I have thought about building my own magnetron sputter. This is really awesome. I love and and I hope I'll see more of you guys in the future.

Every time I watch one of your videos I get bummed when they're over. If you made a video 10 hours long I could watch the entire thing and still be bummed that it wasn't longer.

We call our measurement system "Freedom Fractions". Thanks, I'm here all day.

The marble machine X lacks tight tolerances though. :) Awesome stuff!

18:05 for future reference, couple a rod with a handle using magnets, completely eliminating the need for drilling a hole all the way through (and eliminating any need for gaskets)

21:05 I love the labeling, "ARGON" and "NOT ARGON"... it's quite amusing for some reason. lol =]

some sagely advice learned through drag racing, if you need more efficiency in your cooling of the baffle, try salt water. If you don't want to run salt water (corrosion mostly) run propylene glycol. I use it in my main loop for my intercooler with a brine salt bath. It's getting changed for the air conditioning core/pump from a suburban I think later so I can simplify the whole process, but with either of those you can get sub freezing temperatures in your cooling.

Duuude I JUST watched part 1 and was hoping for more. What perfect timing!

This is absolutely amazing. I've wanted to pvd/cvd coat objects forever and commercial offerings (like vaportech) are not really attainable. This is what I've needed and wanted forever. I have a lathe, mill and CNC mill. My body is ready. Also, McMaster is absolutely wicked amazing.

marble machine X reference, love it

"TAP magic smells like cinnamone" Me, whispering: "The spice... The spice melange"

Copper is indeed annoying to machine, but a very sharp HHS tool with a high positive rake will work better than the 0° carbide tooling you where using. You where basically trying to cut bread with a spoon. You do have to be a little careful as the positive rake tools tend to 'grab' more in copper. You can counteract this by tightening the travel locking screw just a bit so there's a bit of friction. A cutting fluid like the tap magic or WD-40 helps as well.

we used a similar machine at work nanocoating electronics with hydrophobic coating. I have no idea what gas was in it but it tended to turn into some type of glass etching acid in the vacuum pumps. We would coat tissue or anything really and you could submerge it in water and it would not get wet. Electronics would be left submerged all year round and taken out to show clients how they still work. was called something like blue lantern "watershield". cool video. keep up experimenting.

This dude is consistently doing things that would get him burned at the stake in the 1600s and somehow is averaging

Amazing, just amazing. And an engineering cut? Yes please!

you can get spark plugs without the resistor as a lot of new spark plug leads act as the resistor

Its absolute madness to me that you've achieved this as hobbyists on mostly manual machines. Kudos to you both!

For anyone who didn't know: Garolite is also known as G10 (often used as handle material in the knife making industry)

Hey I'd like your thoughts on ball-lightning. I experienced it as a kid with my family during a thunderstorm. We all saw it float through the wall of our house and into the middle of our living room where we were watching a movie. This volley-ball sized, blue-white ball of light hovered there in front of us and then imploded on itself knocking out the power to the house. This strange phenomenon has so many bizarre properties that make it hard to say how exactly it functions and what it really is.

Yes yes yes. I would love to see the engineering cut of the video. This machine is beautiful. Please post more videos about this.

When you showed the dow vac grease it brought a smile to my face 😊 I'm glad you finally got some. It's truly great stuff.

Love seeing McMaster Carr - I live 10 minutes from the warehouse and they let you just call in orders and pick things up, a dangerous game haha

The real magic is that we are even capable of this, that we mere primates are capable of understanding the rules/interactions of nature to such a degree far beyond what is necessary for biological survival. In the blink of a geologic eye we've gone from bashing rocks together to combining math and metal to form absolute wizardry for no other reason than because we can. It is things like this that allow me to be proud of being human when much of our species seems to prefer wasting what brief amount of time we have on our little rock

I recently discovered that isopropyl alcohol makes an excellent cutting fluid for tapping aluminium. Not only does it just work really well, but after you've finished, it just evaporates away, leaving your metal clean.

every time I get a notification of you posting something immediately " ohhh shit what's he doing now".

A humble suggestion. Try using x-rings from McMaster instead of the homemade gaskets for the shutter and the other moving components. X-rings typically work better for dynamic applications - at least rotationally

This isn't the first time Notre Dame was effected by a plasma

As a machinist that made parts for electron microscopes the engineers very specifically wanted to avoid polished surfaces. Thy specifically called for concentric lathe turned faces and oring groves. The circular lines in the finish at the R finish would actually help grip and seal the viton gaskets and orings.

I swear machinist are the most underrated people in the world!!! 🤷🏻‍♂️🙌🏼💯🤘🏼🤙🏼

For sputtering strontium aluminate and other bulk metal oxides, you might try pressing the powder into a disk with a die set like what NileRed used to make his YBCO disks. Might also be beneficial to sinter the disks after pressing, but I'm not sure how that would affect the oxidation state of the dopant.

imagine traveling back in time and showing this to an early alchemist

For copper I use HSS top and side rake with polished faces, wd40 dripping on the cutter. You want the edge very sharp.

You could literally build and sell laboratory equipment. Absolutely amazing work. That is one hell of a life accomplishment there.

This takes 3d printed work to the next level. This is a business opportunity for someone who coats 3d printed parts with various metals. Can we make one using parts from a microwave?

Fun fact: McMaster Carr sells a full sized office, complete with wiring kit, and will deliver it to your door

Basically love the channel, basically. 3 basicallys in the first 10 seconds. This isn't basically anything, it's awesome.

This is the most underrated channel on youtube

I didn't know youtube has plasma wizards

Would it be a good idea to put a thermocouple ie a temperature sensing device on your sputter head to failsafe shutdown the system in the event it overheats (possibly due to cooling failure) ?

All this done in so little time, that is amazing.

The way to deburr aluminum framing ends, is to use a wire wheel like on a bench grinder, or wire brush in drill or lathe, gets into all the nook and crannies in seconds.

The difference between this and the MMX is you didn’t get hamstrung by tying yourself to aesthetic anchors.

You are the real life equivalent of Rick Sanchez

As a scientist working with high vacuum for years now, I can say that you did some of your seals unessesary complicated (sanding really big surface is one of that complications). Almost every time (for your vacuum quality) you want to make some round groove 1-2 mm deep and 2-3 mm wide with good quality surface, place there a vacuum rubber gasket and call it a day. Gasket needs to be slightly taller than groove, so when it pressed against other surface it will be flattened and seal everything, you can achieve better results with two grooves on each surfaces you want to seal.

05:20 I find that usually denatured alcohol is enough lubricant/cooling for tapping and drilling smaller holes in aluminum, if it's not use a drip of some oil

Do you have any concerns about galvanic corrosion in the water cooling, or have you accounted for that in some way I overlooked?

Can you make a one atom thick graphene sheet with it?

This is an amazing video, thank you for sharing the whole process. Although there's no way I'll ever build it, it's simply mind boggling what is possible to do with science

Easily the coolest project I've seen In general but even more so because it was designed built and completed in a garage.. Well done guys

what do you mean adult Lego? don't you know Legos are for people aged 3-99!

Really appreciate that you are sharing how you built the plasma sputterer.

This is such a crazy project. the amount of watercooling jackets needed is crazy on this small of a scale. you guys probably could have made a custom internal combustion engine with that amount of machine work / design.

the DLC coating is really interesting to me because i see it a lot in the knife world

Big props for machining that copper. This thing is no easier to machine than a piece of wet plaster.

13:27 DAMN!!! Those tolerances are BEAUTIFUL!!

Holy Crow that's insane. It's nice to have a person who is so knowledgeable and yet takes the time to explain how things work. The world is a more beautiful place cause of the type of guys.

I actually use one of these almost every day, they are pretty fun. You can use liquid nitrogen to pump down to vacuum faster by keeping it cool

Amazing. I couldn’t help but notice the cortical stacks ;)

I am an isotope ratio mass spectrometer technician and i am absolutely blown away. Stunning achievement. Oil vapour is my enemy- have you looked into turbo molecular pumps? Ceramic spacers and washers are also easy to get these days. I just watched your previous video also, i have a set of digital mass flow controllers gathering dust, i am sorry to say 😅

As a precious metals refiner, I've always wanted to explore the possibilities of metal recovery with a machine like this. It would be like reverse electroplating on some crazy steroids. Love the video and can't wait to see more!

Wow... super impressive. Well done chaps !

You can literally make flexible circuit boards with this machine! 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯

When I was experimenting with direct contact water cooled heatsinks for my LED headlight idea, I used Tellurium copper, aka Copper 145. It has just a little Tellurium and phosphorus which gives it the machinability that of FM Brass. Hope this helps for future machining copper.

Re. the cutting fluid, at work we almost exclusively use Isopropanol for machining/tapping Aluminium. No cleanup required and no offensive smells.

i saw physically at foulab the start of this project, its amazing how far it has advanced. congrats on your success!

I worked at a place that plasma coated high wear parts. According to the nda I signed I cant give too many particulars but essentially we blew metal powder through a plasma gun using an inert gas. Pretty cool deal. The engineers liked making me work out my math muscles though. Lol. It was a pretty cool process to learn regardless.

Loving the DHF stack from Altered Carbon!

Pretty cool. For the evaporator you can also use tungsten wire. Vacuum chambers for telescopes use those to hook pieces of 99.95% aluminium on it to coat mirrors for satellites and really high grade telescopes and other optics. In terms of sealing, you can also use copper. Whatever plastic you are using eventually it will break or degrade. But that implies that all your surfaces need to be pretty flat and whats more important polished. The vaccuum itself or better said the atmospheric pressure is enough to press them down. (with the gasket on the outside). With precision machining and the laws for pressure you can pretty much calculate with how much force the gaskets are pressed together between the materials when you know the surface areas. Another way to seal is to use conical fittings. And on top of that using heat to expand the metal you screw into and liquid nitrogen to cool the part you are screwing. But you have to be careful and not overdo it or you might crack the parts. Usually that is done with specific tolerances where the inside part is already a bit bigger than the outside. You also might want to check the expansion rates of the metal you will be using so it doesn't suddenly "leak" when it gets hot. This technique is very handy when you have parts that can't be welded together and still need a really strong connection like stainless steel and copper.

I will say, using indexable inserts coated in ZrN, TiCN or DLC in the right grade would make your life far easier for machining the copper. You can get just about any carbide grade on ebay, for excellent prices so you don't have to spend $8 per insert. Definitely not throwing stones, just trying to help for your next adventure!

In glassblowing we will use small bits of silver or gold and vaporize them in a very hot and focused flame to coat finished pieces of glass art or coat pieces of glass further out in the flame during the production of glass artwork.

Phenominal work process, the finish and final machine shows what can be achieved with methodical thinking and determination - hats off, amazing outcome!!!!!!!

Wow, that's fascinating. Extra thanks for not having any music. (Most of the times music is annoying. And it makes it harder to understand the words.)

I wish I had the tools, skill, and money to make one of these amazing machines. Amazing job and bonus points for referencing one of my favorite KZfaq channels applied science

The most amazing thing I have ever seen. Would love to see something cut in half to prove it only coats and doesnt transform.

That is so cool. If this kind of technology existed before the internet it probably remains relatively unknown until 30 years or so later. Kind of like 3d printing.

I'm a new age machinist and fabricator, all used to manual. Machines. I've never once ran a cad software, but rumor has it manual machines can still be impressive if the right person is behind them.

we do this at my job it's a process called Physical Vapor Deposition (PVD), we're an electroplating company but also have a PVD facility, we use a giant giant machine that has like 30 tig welders providing the power and has a huge vacuum pump, it's like 30 feet tall maybe 10x10 roughly(that machine not my area of expertise lol) we use 2 different machines that do it in 2 different ways, one called a "hauzer" is alot smaller but we use all kinds of gases and different concentrations to get different colors (argon, nitrogen, oxygen, xenon, acetylene, etc) to get colors like blue, black, all the diff gold colors, and a crazy rainbow pattern somewhat reminiscent of an oil film. it looks insane when it is running (although you cannot look directly at it and certainly not for long or it'll blind you ala staring at the sun lol) it's a big thick center rod with a spring looking piece of metal around it, and when it is running the room gets totally dark and inside the chamber it glows bright pink and shoots out giant pink lightning bolts and stuff, it is awesome!

Wow! There are stories about turning things into other metals, very long tome ago.. and this is ya an illustration of this era about that era😮

I have worked on Trump Laser, they have all kinds of vacuum assemblies fittings gauges and sensors etc., you can probably purchase parts from them and that could save a lot of time them trying to make your own! Also Mazak Laser may be another good source!

I love that you have an AvE welding sticker.

Aluminum extrusion is great, with some caveats: Use braces in the corners to increase stiffness (side panels work great adding shear-resistance too) and be careful using steel fasteners in hand tapped holes, as they'll chew through your threads. Inserts and epoxy are great for that. Also consider adding sand or epoxy granite to the frame to reduce the resonant frequency and add damping.

The process is called sputtering. It’s been a standard thin film deposition process for a long time. Rather than build one they can often be found at a science equipment surplus house for dirt cheap. Even if it’s not working they can be brought up to working status pretty easily. Also you can make an even simpler version with a DC power supply and no water cooling if you’re just doing novelty coating.

This appears to be ..or at least similar to the process used to coat glass and create dichroic glass for decorative fusing, using high voltage electricity to evaporate metals in a vacuum chamber and depositing the metallic vapor on glass. Would this assumption be correct ? … Your videos are top notch, logical, concise and well done. I enjoyed this one very much. Thanks for your attention to detail and the bits of humor were appreciated and all done in good taste. 🤣 All in all ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 👍

In case of aluminium spiritus or ethanol works really wel as a cutting fluid.

This is such a cool machine, it’s very “cartoon mad scientist” which I love