The Ware for November 2014 is shown below.
(No, it’s not my turkey baster. But happy Thanksgiving!)
Thanks to dmo & QB for allowing me to photograph this ware.
This entry was posted on Friday, November 28th, 2014 at 1:46 am and is filed under Hacking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.
The upper part looks like a pump, the numbers on the lower left side remind me of telescopes or other optical equipment.
Hmmm.
It looks like the main mechanism in a temperature regulated control value.
The disc with the nylon cover would likely fit into a valve seat, while the bellow acts to expand and contract under the influence of temperature, and thus control the position of the valve rod.
The black dial is an adjustment to control the setting, determining how much of the bellows force is transformed into valve action.
Normally devices like these have a housing for a working fluid to represent the temperature. It’s possible that this one is acting only on environmental temperature.
In other words – it’s a thermostat.
Yes, a bellow and gasket. Precision set screw to expand bellow. UHV does not normally transfer fluid as this would out gas and destroy the vacuum. I believe this device moves Radio frequency and is a tuning bellow for beam. It might just be for LN to cool crystals but you wouldn’t really need the precision set screw.
fun one.
Well, if it’s not a rotisserie motor ;) it seems to be built more like metrology equipment, a depth gage perhaps?
I’m going to cheat with a second guess.
It’s a dashpot.
It connects via the pushrod to some moving part, and acts to stabilize the motion of that part, and limit oscillations. This one appears to be adjustable via the dial and control rod opposite the bellows.
This is a linear actuator for ultra-high vacuum chambers.
Looks like a CF16 flange but the size is difficult to guess…
Agreed. Conflat and silver-plated bolts means UHV, bellows and knob mean linear actuator. Having a hard time picturing how it’s used, though, given that there are conflats on both sides.
Yup, must be part of some chip manufacture machine, maybe a dopant “gun” used to insert various materials(gas most likely) that compose a complete silicon chip.
Looks like a “Self à roulette” (variable inductor) .
I’m going out on a limb and guessing that it is a precision dispenser for fluids
It looks like something from the food industry. My guess is: a part from a bottle filling machine.
Maybe an injector assembly for some vapor deposition process? Looks like vacuum fittings on the right, and the coil could be for heating of the material to be deposited.
Something related to moving something in a chamber under high vacuum. The upper part looks like a HV bellows to me.
The upper cylinder looks a little like a stacked piezo element linear actuator for high precision positioning. Could this be part of a rig used in bonding the heads onto hard disk armatures?
It is clearly a Very Blunt tattoo gun ;)
Its an antenna tuner. The accordion like section maintains a constant total length independent of temperature or other variations. Actual antenna length gets set by the micrometer knob.
Might be a pressure regulator for plastic injection ?
Looks like a piezo device or a sonotrode
Might be an injector for borg implantants
How about a head for a high performance 3D printer?
My first thought was that that thing on the top was a heatsink, but I think the bellows guesses are right. It looks like it’s constructed to change its total length between the two end-plates, especially with that centre rail.
I assume the knob adjusts either spring tension or damping factor for the motion, but it could be a position/length-setting thing. And it looks like conflat on both ends, which is odd, because that means the post poking out to the right is also under vacuum.
If the knob is just on a thread (position-set, not tension/damping adjustment), then it becomes a means of transferring a linear motion into the vacuum system, i.e. wind the knob to change the plate spacing, which will probably push the plunger in/out, which can then do who-knows-what. Gives an operator a means of pushing stuff inside a hard vacuum, but I wouldn’t know why. And that doesn’t address why the top-left fitting is present – it doesn’t need to be there if this is just a vacuum-crossing linear actuator.
Prop from Total Recall (1990)? The nostrilomatic.
The ware consists of three parallel parts.
I think the lower part with the knob can be extended linearly by turning the knob. On the picture, it’s almost fully extended (see guide rail in the middle). The black rings on the extender must be a scale that shows how much the part has been extended. It should match the numbers on the knob. The value seems to be a bit higher than 4.(Maybe centimeters? I assume that Bunnie found that ware in China, in which case it’s metric. Looking at the screws, inches seem to be a bit to large.) The values on the knob look like 0, 2, and 4 to me, which doesn’t match perfectly the hypothesis about the labels on the scale (After all, what would be the other values? 6, 8, and maybe 10? What for if it’s already fully extended?) Setting the extension doesn’t seem require high precision as neither scale nor knob have intermediate tick marks (eg, millimeters).
As said, the middle part is a guide rail that guides the linear extension and prevents the part from locking up.
The top part is a conduit of some sort. It’s left side (the inlet) seems to connect to a pipe via a six-hole mount. I think the middle is (as said by others) some sort of bellows that separates whatever is in the pipe from the environment (liquid? vacuum? gas?). It allows the pipe to extend linearly. The right side of this part (the outlet) seems to connect to the same sort of mount as used on the left side. Maybe it’s the same mount as at the left side of the bellows? The inlet seems to be a pipe of a smaller diameter than outlet. No idea if they connect directly or if there’s another entry on the rear of the ware.
The left side of the ware seems to be stationary, while the right sides moves depending on the setting of the linear actuator. Note the serial number which appears to be 5608, so there must be more of these. A pity that image quality is so bad this time.
The components on the right side of the ware (screws etc) are flush with the base. I therefore suspect that the whole thing mounts on a bigger part instead of a pipe. Maybe a vacuum chamber? I don’t believe that it’s used to dope silicon as I doubt that that process is controlled with a manual dial (waaay too inaccurate). Also I see no reason for it to be adjustable. And it should have more inlets, as shown here: http://www.mbe-komponenten.de/images/dopant/susi-d-300.jpg
The outlet doesn’t seem to have a nozzle or tip, which gives some hints on how accurately the material is placed in the chamber. For example, in mass spectroscopy materials are usually placed in a vacuum chamber in drops or very fine streams using high-precision nozzles. Here, the outlet’s diameter is quite large – a few millimeters at least. (A pity that we can’t see the opening.) Looking at the design of the whole assembly, I doubt that the material ejects with a high velocity (flow not optimized, bellows will generate turbulences).
In summary, the ware allows one to place bigger quantities of some (gaseous?) material in a vacuum chamber, adjustable in a linear motion but not sideways. A wild guess: I suspect that in the chamber there’s a reaction that consumes the material, and other injectors come from other angles to support it. Some sort of scientific experiment? Maybe a reactor?
1800’s fleshlight
Looks like a nylon or polyprop pulley on the left side, so maybe the top rod rotates through 2 high vacuum bushes. The rings on the lower rod could be 1cm apart and the mechanism has a (hidden) detent step that can be moved along 1cm at a time. The knob on the end is marked in mm and can be rotated to provide intermediate settings within each cm. The end of the rod at top right has a slightly reduced diameter on the last few mm, indicated there is something that should be attached, but is not shown in the photo. My guess is a high vacuum device that allows slow rotation to be conveyed at moderate depth accuracy into a chamber. As with other posters, there is much speculation going on here.
the white plastic piece on the left is a teflon or silicone rubber seal that goes into a pneumatic cylinder that has been removed from the device. the pneumatic cylinder is bolted onto the central bar, so when it is pressurized (or evacuated) the whole upper plate moves in and out, and the thin pushrod on the right moves with it inside the high vacuum chamber. the bellows is simply a seal. the black knob controls an adjustable travel stop that limits how far it retracts, graduated in millimeters. the five black grooves maintain an oil film on the sliding bar and give dirt somewhere to go, as well as indicating position in centimeters.
the pushrod connects by a set screw to something else inside the vacuum chamber, probably a bumper plate that pushes substrate/sample plates around. since nobody would treat a semiconductor wafer so harshly, i’d guess this positioner is used on a manufacturing line in coating displays with ITO or some other physical deposition process.
It looks like a pressure regulator or valve used mostly in the machine tool industry.