A Palm-Sized Mass Spectrometer! (Residual Gas Analyzer)

Teardown and explaination of a quarupole mass spectrometer - the smallest i've seen. Balzers QMA064 from the 1980's.
Check Paul Brooking's DIY Quad MS!
• Working Home made Mass...

[@erupsoahc]

Increasing in quality of videos. keep at it my dude

[@bansci]

This is great, you have a nice pacing and real scientific technical teardowns like this are very rare, so thank you. There are some single frame images between cuts which causes flicker, I wonder what you're using to video edit? I used to used kdenlive but now I'm on lightworks which was so good I even bought a software license for the first time in 20 years... I've got one of these too in the very same way as you did. I bought a vacuum, turbo, and turbo controller set and it had one of these RGA tubes in it (but no RGA controller sadly). It has 8 normal vacuum feedthroughs and a central BNC. The last bit of research I did indicated it might have a multiplier in it but I've not removed it from the system as I didn't want another port yet. Seeing you disassemble this gives me the confidence to take a very careful look too. I thought about building a RGA control system, and even bought a faulty RGA controller to take a look but not done it yet and wasn't sure of voltages/frequencies, so will be watching your videos very carefully!

[@osmanfb1]

thanks for the very interesting detailed video. can't wait until this is connected to a vacuum system. Does it need to be UHV?

[@chromatogiraffery3104]

Nope! Anything up to 10^-5 mbar should be fine. My system averages 10^-6 mbar

[@JustinKoenigSilica]

Awesome! I'm always anxiously waiting for videos from you, keep it up! Weird editing though, these jump cuts are kind of... Odd. Sorry.

[@chromatogiraffery3104]

Thanks a bunch! Don't know how the jumps slipped my eye, I'll fix it when I get the time.

[@bigsteve6729]

Any update on getting it working that would be so cool to get going, I'd imagine the vacuum system is going to be difficult? Really great you give all the technical and scientific information about it as that's exactly what I'm looking to learn about. Looks like you got a great find with that! I am so amazed at how some pieces of metal, rods, and an element can show you the constitutional makeup of substances. going to subscribe and follow along to see if you get it working 😁👍

[@chromatogiraffery3104]

Thanks! Got it working just a few days ago, actually. Video to come at some point

[@bigsteve6729]

@@chromatogiraffery3104 That's great, I timed it right it seems I am eagerly awaiting the video. I've a question for you if you don't mind. Given the different methods of analyzing a sample, gas chromatography for example. If building a DIY rig, and another DIY setup using the same build temperatures, materials, carrier gas pressures etc. Could you reasonably assume you'd get similar peaks and curves over the same time period, and so if pure samples of the composite parts of a unknown sample were ran through the system to create a set of curve data, could you apply this to all of the DIY systems and although jerryrigged with cat litter and an Arduino you could expect to reliably be able to identify curves on it? And have the same results on others of the same construction as long as your comparative pure sample curves were also taken on that machine Sorry for the convoluted waffle, I am just getting into it and I'm really interested. Thanks for reading

[@multiarray2320]

​@@bigsteve6729still no answer. cant understand the question on my own though.

[@zaprodk]

There's a d missing in the video description (quarupole) :)

[@bansci]

Another comment, quadrapole mass specs are really rare on KZbin. I can find links to magnetic mass specs, like this kzbin.info/www/bejne/rpDPYohtj7trmqs, or the one by applied science, but not quads. Thanks again for the link in the description!

[@chromatogiraffery3104]

Quads are easy to produce industrially, but home-brewing the rod assembly is near impossible. One also needs some rather fancy RF electronics, operating at kilovolts at 1-10 MHz, which is also slightly terrifying. On the other hand, building good, uniform, analyzer electromagnets are equally cumbersome, and they operate at 100-300A DC!