Vacuum Vapor Deposition

Crucial issue are the mean-free path and the size of parts to be made.
Sorry that I don't have MFPs numbers in my head. High vacuums are needed to
get long MFPs, so atoms leaving the material being evaporated can get to the
target surfaces without being stopped en-route. High vacuum is cheap in
space, not in garages on Earth. To get a good vacuum on Earth, one must
"bake" the whole system so as to drive off molecules "sorbed" on inside
surfaces, which means the whole system must be able to fit in an oven and
tolerate baking temperatures of several hundred C for several hours. Then,
in the old days, a "cold trap" with liquid nitrogen was used to trap
residual gas molecules. I doubt a system like this could be had for a few
hundred dollars no matter how cleaver one was unless the vacuum volume was
pretty small. Jay Huebner

To bring this back to VVD, has this been done on Earth. Does it
require microgravity? Could this be done at home, in a garage?
Sure, it requires a vacuum. And I'm not talking about setting up a
full-blown industry next to the bicycle and Webber grill. But can
one buy a machine to do this on a hobby scale, or perhaps build the
machine(s) from off-the-shelf parts for a couple hundred bucks?

Xenophile (who just discovered that Braille is a six-bit binary
system... WOW!)