Coat ANYTHING in METAL: Magnetron Sputtering Machine Build

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This machine, is as close to magic as we've come as a species. It takes a sheet of metal, turns it into plasma and then can coat literally anything in that metal. Today we discuss how we built this incredible machine!

Ben's amazing videos:

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Chapters:
0:00 Intro
3:33 Sourcing materials
4:30 Cart
6:20 Base PLate
7:45 Choosing vacuum materials
10:40 Baffle
13:20 Sputter Head
17:20 Rotary Couplings
19:11 High Current Feedthrough
20:34 Gas Flow Valves
21:40 Sponsor
22:36 Next Time Sneak Peek
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[ToiletPhone]

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.

[hadinossanosam]

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

[PlasmaChannel]

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

[ZK-cdjo]

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

[a.bergantini]

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!

[adrianodiaz]

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

[boelwerkr]

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.

[kubeek]

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.

[haitchteeceeeightnineeight]

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.

[ethanmiller]

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.

[ChristopherCobra]

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 .

[dannydetonator]

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.

[theofficialczex]

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.

[TofuInc]

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.

[TruthIsTheNewHate]

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.

[erictaylor]

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.

[wizewizard]

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.

[spaxxor]

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.

[ColinTimmins]

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

[dingus]

This dude is consistently doing things that would get him burned at the stake in the 1600s and somehow is averaging <1m views???