It has been a pretty slow week. Nothing much on hand, no work piling sky high. After a meeting on Monday with a particular customer, I spent that afternoon along with yesterday & today's morning in only 1 site.
It was only a case of system unable to pump down. After the tele-conversation with the customer, I deduced that the fault either lies with the turbomolecular pump or the turbopump controller. As of Monday afternoon, only the turbomolecular pump was available in our store. No controller. ZERO stock in our GLOBAL warehouse.
Upon dismantling down the turbomolecular pump, I found that the blades spin smoothly. Meaning the problem doesn't lie with this part. I checked the output supply from the turbopump controller & found that there was only a 5v reference voltage. 45v was missing. How unfortunate for me but vice versa for my customer. The turbomolecular pump costs approximately USD$13K whereas the controller is only a paltry USD$5K+ or so.
Although they manage to save on the parts but we had no stock on hand! I managed to locate a "used" controller from 1 of my colleagues & assured my customer that I will run up their system with the old controller first & replace it ASAP upon receival of the new set. But that will have to wait till Tuesday as it was already close to 5pm & my colleague was in the west while I was in the north-east. Even though we were only about 30km apart but peak hour traffic is a killer. It will take me at least 3 hours to go to & fro.
Tuesday morning was a surprise as a new controller ordered by another colleague just happen to come in. I made the call to him & hi-jack it with his permission as his wasn't an urgent case. After replacing the turbopump controller, the system pump down accordingly & upon hitting the vacuum threshold, the Ion Getter Pump kicked in. But the gun vacuum was too weak & thus an overnight bake-out had to be performed. I assured my customer that by Wednesday lunch time her system will be up & running without a glitch.
This morning the gun vacuum was a beautiful 1e-010mbar & I ran up the gun to paper specifications. After checking the extraction ratio & probe current reading, some minor adjustments were made to the filament current & extractor voltage. Gun & aperture alignments were done after allowing the beam to settle down 30mins later.
After handing over the system back to my customer, it started pouring elephants & hippopotamus. Damn it! The sky don't look like it will stop any time in the near future so I braved through the downpour back home on my trustworthy bike.
Even though the rain was pretty heavy but I still think that heaven is kind to me. Visibility & road conditions were still good enough for me to reach home safely. The only major upset is that I am drenched from head to toe. Even my underwear is not spared...
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