Poor Man's Clean Room

Today we offer you a few methods to more efficiently clean your optics without having to invest in expensive equipment. Watch until the end to see how we made a decent, but very affordable clean room.

Find us on Patreon and our website:

[MicroscopicMedia]

The only channel I WON'T click off of for a topic as mundane as cleanroomliness. You're a cool dude and your videos are great!

[danielgawedzki]

As someone who works with infrared optics and camera optics often, the stuff done in this video is exactly what I was thinking of doing. Love the content.

[vanrensburgsgesicht]

I once worked in exactly this area at ASML. The last stage in the cleaning process was a dark corner with a grazing light, a UV lamp and a gun with de-ionized nitrogen to detect and blow away the last particles. Even in the ISO Class 6 clean room, this was still a work of patience.

[neoc]

Tip for the ultrasonic cleaner. You can just put your water in the main tank then put your parts to clean in mason jars with the mixture of cleaning solution. This way the water in the tank doesn't get dirty and the glass of the mason jar doesn't interfere with the ultrasonic frequency. Plastic containers will not work nearly as well since the attenuate the frequency.

[guard]

I really like that you don't cut out every extraneous mistake or detail and reshoot things, makes it feel more real, but doesn't distract from the point. Those moments where you have to talk to the person holding the camera add to a feeling of athenticity that is really good.

[BraveRubberDuck]

I don't work in an area that needs this. I don't do anything at home that needs this. And yet, here I am. Love the content ❤️

[AliSot]

This channel always amazes me.
I get here after half a year of being absent from YT, look at the video and go - oh what a very long manual for cleaning?
But you always hit that spot. Always covering the important bits, delivering 45min of take home messages basically.
You guys are doing a fantastic job. Thank you for producing such high quality content.

[raymobula]

Live streams sound awesome!

Having worked in a clean room - this is fantastic. Consider adding an isopropanol step as cleaning step after acetone. Acetone can form oligomers over time. Isopropanol removes these.

[KnightsWithoutATable]

I would recommend Kim wipes after paper towels to remove the lint paper towels leave. You won't go through them as much so you will still save by mostly using the paper towels, but you can still get the last of the lint off with the Kim wipes at the end. Kim wipes are also what you use for drying out the last of water or solvent after cleaning glassware used for chemistry, so they are useful for anywhere you need a lint free wipe.

[VAXHeadroom]

Using the film plastic's static properties in your FAVOR is great - first time I'd seen that idea!!

[ThomasSuckow]

The cleanliness of LIGO is impressive. Used to read their public logs where they would describe finding a metal shaving and investigate how it happened.

[RonGarrisonProductions]

Your discussion of dirt on laser optics reminded me of my previous work on optical communication systems. The single-mode fibers have a core diameter of 9 uM, and the output power of the amplifier was around 20 dBm (0.1W). That works out to an energy density of about 1.5 x 10^9 Watts per square meter, which is 25x the energy density at the surface of our Sun. A single spec of dust on the surface of the fiber would blast a crater into the end of the fiber as soon as power was applied

[johncage]

One of the reasons I love your content: The very precise wording in your explanations. It is very often important and you always do this outstandingly well. Thank you very much!

BTW: Idea for a different new episode concerning "Poor Man's Clean Room - For Electronics Work". E.g. if you have to open a broken hard disk for repairs / data recovery. (There is a bit of content out there about this topic, but I haven't seen anything really good yet, though.)

... and good luck with your laser project.

[Muonium]

If anyone has insomnia problems feel free to ask me all about dirt / dust particles on ultrahigh power (terawatts / petawatts) laser optics for inertial confinement fusion since it's how I make my living for a couple decades now. One anecdote - in the system I work on, the beams have to be spatially filtered after every laser amplification stage to suppress intrabeam anisotropies or 'hot spots' that can easily exceed gigawatts per sq cm and thus spontaneously collapse into microscopic filaments during their traversal through fused silica glass due to the Kerr-induced self focusing effect. The lenses on these spatial filters are also holding vacuum since the beam at its focal point in the middle of the sf tube drastically exceeds the dielectric breakdown gradient of air and would simply turn air into plasma if allowed into the tube.

There was an accident initially evacuating the tubes about 30 years ago where the oil diffusion pump somehow backflowed silicone oil vapor into the sf tube, contaminating everything. We've tried multiple methods of cleaning the tube over the years but inevitably a monolayer of oil molecules deposits on the vacuum facing side of the sf tube's lenses for this location, the laser pulses hit the oil, it detonates, and causes microscopic cracks and damage to the optic which progressively enlarge with every subsequent shot, eventually destroying the optic. You can see what the damage to a lens looks like if you image search for "flickr omega lens damage". It was simply decided years ago that they would just live with the contamination and replace the lenses for a few thousand dollars when they inevitably get destroyed every year or so as a 'cost of doing business' kind of thing.

As an aside, I approve of practically every technique in this video. The ultrasonic cleaning in ultrapure water, the spectroscopic grade acetone cleaning, the sequential rinsing, the solvent drag wiping, the CO2 snow cleaning, the First Contact film, we do ALL of it. I will add one thing, the hydrophilicity of a glass surface is the absolute touchstone of surface cleanliness. Water will always "break" off of an even microscopically soiled glass surface and the wetting contact angle will be high. On a truly atomically pure surface of glass however, the water will "sheet" off in a very uniform and highly even way, so much so that you will be able to observe the Newton's fringes of ambient light interference in the thinning few-molecular layer thick sheet of water as it falls off of and evaporates from the optic surface.

[fivelights]

You genuinely have one of the best practical science channels on YouTube. I don't think ill ever use most of what's discussed in this video, however I feel more empowered having watched it!

[AudioThrift]

This was really cool. It’s always the videos that seem like they’ll be boring that are the most fascinating! I want a bottle of that polymer cleaner now.

[kellyschlumberger]

As a calibration engineer, QC dept requested low-lint / lint-free wipes. Got clean room wipes and they loved them. Weeks later their corporate managers in Tokyo sent magnified photos of what they called "spider-silk" on shock absorber pistons. Somebody showed me the reports and I immediately recognized the problem. The pistons were made of sintered metal, which was grabbing the fine polyester from the wipes on the abrasive surfaces. Problem was solved quickly.

[AndrewMerts]

Another protip for budget friendly cleaning. Instead of paper towels, use coffee filters. They aren't lint-free but they don't shed and tear as easily as paper towels, so if you aren't following the paper towel cleaning with an ultrasonic bath and a bunch of additional cleaning steps, the coffee filters leave you a little better off. They're still ridiculously cheap and don't pose a risk of breaking the bank.

Someone else already mentioned using a mason jar inside the ultrasonic cleaner but I think they left out some of the best advantages of it. If you use plain old tap water in the ultrasonic bath and just put your detergents and solvents in a mason jar then you can use much less solvent and it's a lot easier to swap what solution you're using for whatever project you're working on. You mentioned alkaline vs. a more neutral pH solution for stainless steel vs. aluminum but there's plenty of other considerations as well. Hot ethylene glycol based antifreeze is actually a pretty good cleaner when working with grimy parts with old caked on, carbonized parts. Maybe you want a spicier bath of (not heated!) acetone or gasoline. That'd be a terrible idea in the ultrasonic bath as is but by putting it in a mason jar it's easy to clean up, it's not evaporating into the shop, and you can have a variety of solutions sitting on a shelf so you can chose something more specific to what you're trying to clean without all the hassle of draining out the bath and filling it up with whatever you're switching to. Just to name a few, generic dish soap, purple power, straight up lye, ethylene glycol, acetone, methanol, isopropanol, gasoline, ammonia, various acids, tetrachloroethylene, Berryman chem-dip, sulfuric acid and hydrogen peroxide, 7 herbs and spices, the list goes on.

Obviously some of those are not going to end well inside of a literal mason jar with the simple plastic liner on a metal lid but the point is just put it in some appropriate glass container and then you put the container in the bath instead of the parts directly.

[crawford]

As a microscope and optics tech, clean dust free surfaces were very critical to a clean assembly. A trick for a quick fix is to cover your work surface with freshly unrolled aluminum foil. The foil surface is almost guaranteed to be free of dust or lint. It also is free of static charges. Try it when you really need to clean your camera or other projects where such an environment is an advantage.

[saipa]

I use clean/new Blu Tack to remove particals from lenses. Just gently dab the affected area once, create a clean surface on the Blu Tack and repeat. I've just cleaned an old microscope this way. Thanks for the great videos!