[Scratch-]

Here is a rough draft of a vacuum chamber I’m planning on building. Tell me if you guys have any good ideas/suggestions.

[Scratch-]

1 -- When I have the chamber at a certain pressure I can put things in canning jars and they will keep the same pressure they had even if I have the chamber at a different pressure.
2 -- An airlock type thing that I can bring to the same pressure as the inner chamber without depressurizing the inner chamber, letting me move things from outside to inside.
3 -- Well... you don’t expect me to expose my bare hands to a vacuum do you? The gloves are on the end of a stiff kind of hinged tube so I can extend my arm into the chamber.
4 -- Contains a vacuum pump, temp control and some gages for reading the temp/pressure etc. inside.

[Corvettaholic]

Looks pretty cool, I want one! What are using for a vacuum pump?

[Scratch-]

A motorized and modified variant of this:
http://scitoys.com/scitoys/scitoys/aero/vacuum/

[Scratch-]

I'm also going to use the same principal to cool and heat the chamber, I'm going to have a liquid with a low boiling temperature, like alcohol, sitting in pipes running through the walls of the chamber. Ill then pump out the air around the alcohol, making it boil from low pressure. Ill then pump the alcohol vapor out of the pipes and pressurize it in a jar, recondensing it. I could also do the opposite to heat the chamber. It should make a nice heat pump.

[Corvettaholic]

OK, that pump is cool. Got me thinking about making a jumbo sized model of it. Too bad plastic isn't heat resistant though, cause you could have some other neat applications available. Could probably get away with metal pipes from home depot, but it'd be more expensive. If you had the cash laying around, you could probably grab a vacuum pump from a summit racing magazine (made for cars) and adapt that to a bell jar. I assume concrete is air tight?

[Scratch-]

Concrete is mostly airtight unless its cracked. Luckily I live with my parents and they will throw in some funding. I plan to make the chamber like a thermos, two layers of mirrored glass with a vacuum sandwiched in-between. That will let me move heat in and out without much heat escaping. I will also have the ability to fill the chamber with the gas of my choice, like pure oxygen, CO² or nitrogen.

[Scratch-]

Oh, I might add electrical heating wires too.

[Corvettaholic]

Couldn't you hook up the pump backwards and super-pressurize the chamber too? You could have a secondary chamber that the pump connects to and have a switching mechanism to determine what the pump does? You could play with having materials above their boiling point, yet won't boil due to boyle's law and pressure. Careful with that though, cause if the pressure accidentally equalizes... it'd be a bad day.

[Scratch-]

Of course I can reverse the flow. Do you think I would leave a feature out of this cool device?  

[Corvettaholic]

Any idea how much you can overpressurize it before you blow the seals? That could get messy. Wonder how close you can get to total vacuum? I know its just about impossible to reach total vacuum, but if you want all the O2 gone, just chuck some rubidium in there. I don't know if "chuck" is the right word for it though...

[Scratch-]

TV companies used to use bits of cesium to burn all the air out of their TVs making a nearly perfect vacuum. NOTE: don’t try to open a TV, the force of the implosion will spray glass, phosphorus and toxic metals everywhere.

[Corvettaholic]

I remember seeing videos of people shooting at TV's with a .22, sprayed junk everywhere. I remember from Jdurg's article that cesium is used to evacuate all the air out of stuff, seems to be a good use for the stuff. I figure, if I could get my own airless glass tube, I'm sure I could find something neat to do with it involving high voltage and an electron gun.

[Scratch-]

You could fill it with a noble gass and make your own flash tube.