Nice stuff. I work with ultra high vaccum, and at that type of pressure the high vapour pressure becomes annoying as any impurity outgasses easily and degrades the vacuum. We would need to bake the system to get rid of all the water and organics to achieve a pressure of around 10^-10 Torr.
Oh !! Ya for those high vacuum oil pump should replace the oil from time to time, but we are somewhat lazy and thats really tiring!!!!!
Just curious, do you work with mass spec? I dont have much idea about machines which need strong vacuum XD
I work with molecular beam epitaxy. I will probably write a post about it soon. Yeah, we have mass specs as well, and we don't use oil pumps. Oils are contaminants for us, and we use either cryopumps and magnetic operated turbo pumps with a oil free backing pump.