A Plenum Holiday

Cooke Vacuum wishes all our friends a big fat plenum for the new year.   Ok, a weak wordplay, the antonym of vacuum,  but a nice word, barely-used and low mileage.

What do we hope for in the coming months?   A lot less war,  first and foremost.  A lot less religion applied as a weapon.   Much more attention to improving the lot of man on the planet.   A return to the vital role of science and technology in solving the problems of science and technology.    Restoration of faith in society,  government,  civilization.

Much more specifically,  we hope that your kids can find careers like yours,  have valid reasons for exploring the wonder of the physical world,  touch,  measure, design, invent and create.   Even get their hands dirty.   We hope that national funding for science catches up with the reality of a global economy.   We hope that curiosity and altruism edge out placidity and greed.   We hope that the work that we do pleases us,  and helps others.   And at Cooke, we hope that you continue to challenge us  to build the furniture of understanding.

Best wishes, now and always,

Richard and everyone

Energy Savings and High Vacuum

We make diffusion pumps – an antique but robust and effective route to high vacuum, especially in little and very large systems. Between the diff pump and a cryotrap, there’s a great deal of energy expended. A 20″ pump may use 15kW, with nearly all that power going into the cooling water, which is another story, since almost everybody is forced to use chillers. Cryo pumps also use a great deal of power, and, like diff pumps, can’t be turned on very quickly, so they’re generally left on all the time. They need a recirculating chiller to function as well. (Or, if air-cooled, the same burden thrown on the building’s HVAC – murderously expensive in clean rooms.) Turbomolecular pumps ramp up quickly, and use tens of watts instead of thousands, but in many applications, either cost or chemical considerations rule these out. Then, there’s liquid nitrogen, an increasingly expensive cryo trap filler.

For some applications, such as semiconductor fab or heat treating furnaces, there’s almost no choice: you use whatever technology is traditional and is known to work, regardless of energy consumption. For others, such as

And The Question is….Aluminum

And the answer is, sure, use aluminum. It’s light, chemically a better bet than stainless, a great vacuum material. So, other than major semiconductor tools hogged out of a solid, steamer trunk-sized billet of very clean forged aluminum, why all this stainless? One reason: flanges. Metal-sealing (CF) flanges are rather complex as aluminum/hard material hybrids- can you say ‘explosive bonded’? Nearly all of the flanges, fittings, adapters, feedthroughs etc. are available only in stainless, and you just can’t weld them to aluminum chambers, so generally, the chambers tend to be stainless. Parts that don’t have to weld on, such as doors, are easy with aluminum. Welding aluminum is sometimes thought to be tricky… and it is, especially if a join has to be reworked, and maintaining tight dimensional tolerances without careful and complete fixturing can be impossible.

If you do choose to design the light stuff into a vacuum project, then, do the following:

Blog along with us

A new owner of an older Cooke system writes asking about “blogging along” with us to learn the mysterious art of system rebuild. This is not as outrageous or naive as it sounds. Because we have thousands of systems out there, and because many of them are owned second-, third- or more-hand, often by people new to high vacuum, there is a need for help in restoring, adapting, or maintaining. My closest competitor charges $3200/day to send a man out – presumably plus travel. Clearly beyond most budgets! We answer many, many telephone or email inquiries, almost always for free; our customers, even if they’re not original purchasers, can’t afford on-site help. But, from a business standpoint, what we do is crazy!

The suggestion from our more businesslike friends is to charge for telephone and written help beyond warranty, something lower than a typical field service rate, but enough to pay for someone to do it. How exactly we can do this remains unclear, especially since few of our (university, especially) customers can easily approve charges by themselves. We certainly don’t want to drive anyone away, but those hour-long conversations about how to tell if a pump has departed, where to buy something we don’t sell, or what to do if an ion gauge doesn’t light up….. they have to addressed a little better. Open-ended PO’s? Charge card numbers? Anyone who can offer suggestions — blog us!

How to Buy an Elephant

Since book titles aren’t protected, I can use this great title from decades ago.  The elephant, of course, is some great big piece of process gear on which, you’re told, the future of your company/startup/grant depends.   Problem is,  unlike something profiled by a consumer magazine, or on-line surveys,  the beast you need is somewhat of a massive unknown.  Make the wrong decision, and, well, the least of your problems is trying to keep it running.

Cooke Vacuum is only a little in the elephant business, making somewhat less complex R&D gear, but to our customers,  our products often appear to be major investment, with no backup, no budget for repairs; i.e. big as an elephant!   I’d like to give a course on how to make a correct buy, or at least a mostly correct buy,  as I do think that there are  techniques and methods to be learned.  Maybe something ongoing here in the blog.

Today’s tip is:  Buy simple.  Unless you know that your elephant can be pastured after six months, on somebody else’s pasture,   plan on it being around for a very long time.  Also, in most cases, plan on diminishing parts and service support from the vendor (not us, of course!), no matter how vital the thing has become to your enterprise.   Simplicity, and user serviceability rules.   Complex control systems,  hardwired and un-removable components,  needlessly unique parts…. all contribute to a system headed fast to the scrap heap.   The smart customer asks for generic components,  replaceable and upgradeable controls, and, as hard to define as it is,  a product that can be understood in detail by you, and the next user, and the one after that.   Buy simple- be happy.

Today’s hint is brought to you by a customer call for help with a tool from company A, that became company B, that was absorbed into C, and that has no memory of products A.  We name no names.

The rocky road to Thanksgiving

So we got one (is it p.c. to say loony?) guy wanting us to build a fusion machine in our lab for zilch. (Should we call Homeland Security?) Then two more respectable guys from respectable universities asking, respectively, about pasting their old parts into new build and leasing a (low-cost) tool because they can’t afford one. Then an overseas trading company ordering a couple dozen special gauge heads and cancelling after delivery. All this the week before Thanksgiving. This is a sampler of life in the custom equipment world.

Still, we’ve a lot to be thankful about. As some of our competition sensibly, but not wisely, gives up on the R&D customer, there’s more and more interesting work to do. Science is not dead in America, just resting, and we have faith that, pretty soon, people will realize that technological leadership is more important than just giving up. Even our Connecticut backwater seems to have just discovered that there’s such a thing as nanotech!

Presented for your consideration this week is a call for comments on MEMS process tools. What would you like to see in an etch or deposition tool that you can’t find? This wishlist could include process, tooling, in-situ monitoring, etc. Also, if you have a pet gizmo that you think we might be able to commercialize (no guarantees!), let us know.

Welcome to the Cooke Vacuum Blog

A blog is an easy way to add current info to our website. It also allows us to get feedback in addition to our information form. From time to time we may also have notes on the little discoveries that make equipment or process less difficult. Interactivity…..

Please, please, please use our email to contact us about system inquiries. The blog is a public area!