this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2025
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I love shit like that.
We have this incredibly expensive machine that was made by incredible engineers and scientists who spent an ungodly amount of hours on it. And their solution to some kind of problem with the machine, was to wrap a part in kitchengrade alu-foil, probably from the employee kitchen.
Aluminum foil is very common in physics labs. And a main use for it is "baking"! To get ultra high vacuum (UHV)* you generally need to "bake out" your chamber while you pump down. Foil is used same as with baking food
keep the heat in and evenly distributed on the chamber.
Sadly, it's usually not food grade aluminum foil, as that can contain oils, and oils and vacuum are generally a big no-no.
*Just how good is UHV? Roughly: I live in San Francisco, which is ~7 miles by ~7 miles (~11km). Imagine you raise that by another 7 miles to make a cube. Now, evacuate every last molecule of gas out of it. Now take a family sedan's trunk, fill it with 1 atmosphere of gas, and release that into the 7 mile cube. That's roughly UHV pressure.
How can a metal contain oil?
It'd be coated, but it's from processing, cold rolling metal generates a lot of heat, especially going that thin (thinnest I was around often was ~0.2mm), we'd often temper the material after processing, mainly for surface finish, mill rolls would be sprayed with lubricating coolant really close to what you'd see in use on a milling machine. This was with steel but same principle applies, pretty sure the lubricant we used is also labeled for use on aluminum mills, but you'd use food safe stuff for kitchen foil.