Sealing the IVC

Now that you are done installing the tower and have done an electrical check to make sure the SQUET cards and striplines are okay, you are ready to seal the IVC. You are going to need indium, methanol, clean room wipes, and vacuum grease. Additionally, you should wear gloves during this process to prevent your fingers from making the wire dirty.

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1. From the roll of 1.5 mm diameter indium, measure out a length of the wire such that when it wraps around the rim of the bottom IVC flange the two ends of the wire will cross over by ∼ 2 inches. Inspect this wire and make sure that there are no dents in the wire - these would make the flange susceptible to a leak. If the wire looks good, cut the wire from the roll.
2. Holding the wire with your thumb and forefinger at one end, let the wire hang. To clean the wire, prepare a clean room wipe soaked with methanol. Gently wipe from top to bottom the indium wire. You should wipe it down as if you were gently trying to smooth the wire (actually, if there are any bumps in the wire then you would want to smooth them out via this process). Rotate the wire each time you wipe it down so that you have cleaned all around it. After a few times doing so, hold the other end of the wire so you are wiping from top to bottom from the other end. Take care not to wipe down the indium too much so that you are ruining its integrity by removing indium from the wire.
3. You are now going to put vacuum grease onto the wire. The rule of thumb is that it is better to have less than more vacuum grease on the wire. Take the tube of vacuum grease and very, very gently tap your finger at the opening of the tube. Hopefully only a slight amount of vacuum grease has come onto your glove. You know you have an excess if there’s enough to form a glop on your finger. Wipe some of it off on a clean wipe.
4. Similar to how you wiped the clean wipe soaked in methanol down the wire, rub your finger with the vacuum grease down the wire. Do this again after rotating the wire to make sure you are coating the whole surface. When you are done, wipe your fingers clean on a methanol- soaked clean wipe, and rub your finger over the wire. This is to remove excess vacuum grease. We only want a very thin layer on the wire.
5. Wipe down the rim of the bottom IVC flange again.
6. Carefully lay the wire down on the rim of the bottom IVC flange. Wrap the wire around the flange and bring the two ends together. Cross one end over the other, and press down on the crossover to hold the wire in place. The flange with the indium wire is now ready to be taken into the mini clean room.

Two people are needed to seal the IVC. This is so that the bottom flange can be lifted evenly and can be attached levelly.

1. Take the bottom flange with the indium wire into the mini cleanroom. One person should already be waiting in the cleanroom to receive the flange. The other person will come in after they have handed the flange off.
2. Rotate the flange so that it is in the desired orientation to be attached to the upper IVC flange. There should be tape on the bottom and upper IVC flanges to designate how to align them.
3. Both people should lift the flange together. Be careful of any hanging striplines as you lift the flange that the striplines don’t knock against the inner walls. Additionally, make sure to gently push in coiled and attached striplines so that the bottom flange can be lifted around them.
4. Carefully connect the bottom flange to the upper flange without jostling the indium wire. Take an M5x16 screw from the screw box and insert it into one of the holes by hand and twist it in. Be VERY careful not to hit the indium wire as you insert the screw through. Also make sure that the screw is on the outside of the wire (or you will have a HUGE problem with your seal…). Insert another screw into a hole 180 degrees apart from the first screw. Tighten them to the same level without tightening them too much. You want these screws in far enough that they support the flange without having the flanges pressing against the wire.
5. Insert the rest of the screws by hand to the same level as the first two screws.
6. Use a balldriver now to tighten the screws. Do NOT tighten one screw at a time as much as you can. This will not create a good seal. Instead, you will tighten each screw an 1/8th of a turn and move onto the next screw. As you can imagine, this will take a long time to finish completely tightening the flange, but it must be done. When you can no longer tighten the screws with the ball driver, then you will switch to the allen key. Again, do not tighten each screw as much as possible, but only go about an 1/8th of a turn. When you hear the screws starting to click as you turn them, you are done tightening the flange at this point.
7. Remove contents from mini clean room and remove the mini clean room from around the IVC.