The January 2021 issue of the Bell Jar is available

This fourteenth issue may be found on the Articles & Publications page. Topics include Mark Atherton's floating filament and grid power supply, the surface micro-discharge (SMD) atmospheric pressure plasma source, an update on Richard Hull's Fusor V and activation experiments, the saddle field ion source, Joe Malek on simulating electrostatic fields and amateur friendly suppliers of vacuum hardware. As usual, there are some more listings of articles of possible interest in Vacuum Technology & Coating magazine.

Introducing the BVES

March 25, 2020. Complete documentation for a low-cost vacuum educational tool (the Basic Vacuum Education System or BVES) is now available. Check out the Vacuum Education page for details.

We're (still) Rebuilding!

March 20, 2020 Status Summary:

Over the past few months, the big news has been the resumption of the Bell Jar as a monthly, free publication. I have gotten good feedback but it will probably take a while to start receiving reader projects. Hopefully that will come.

In August 2019 a new Education section was added (see the navigation button). This set of pages contains a set of information on vacuum training equipment (including legacy systems), details on construction, exercise information, etc. Information on new trainers is in progress.

During the latter half of 2019 the old Flash videos were updated. The Forum is now disabled and a number of pages have been retired. Some are simply not relevant anymore. Others need to be retooled. This would include the Books page where I had Amazon links. This will be replaced with descriptions and no links.

I am no longer providing accessories such as adapters, chambers, etc. The volume was never high enough to justify the effort. These will be replaced by drawings and commercial sources.

I stopped posting links to my Vacuum Technology & Coating articles in 2012. The publisher also changed the the on line magazine server. I will have an index to articles (2009-present) with issue month/year, title and an optional brief description. As a precursor to this, I have been grouping my articles into topic areas (gauging, pumping performance, etc.) and publishing a selection in each issue of the Bell Jar.

I have retained my "man-in-vacuum" logo, even though it creeps some people out (so I've heard).