getting pumped

I knew it would be prudent to take a better look at the Pfeiffer TPU 110 turbomolecular pump that came as part of my vacuum chamber purchase, especially given the issues sustained during shipping. Presumably for the sake of providing clearance to the rack mounted electronics, there was a sort of Z-shaped duct to push the pump further towards the rear of the cabinet as can be seen here:

That meant I simply couldn't look down at it from the inside of the chamber, so I had to remove it. After removing it, I found that there was a conflat copper gasket still attached to the flange on the pump, and another on the chamber side flange. I'm not aware of stacked gaskets being acceptable practice. There was also a groove cut on the upper side of the pump's gasket, indicating that it had been reused.

After removing it, I found that there was a splinter shield at the pump inlet, in conjunction with the coarse shield at the base of the chamber. The knife edge on the flange appears good.

Happily, the splinter shield was clean of any kind of crud or debris, and in excellent condition. Though more importantly, I wanted to verify that nothing too obvious was wrong with the pump itself. Thus, I removed the shield and gave the pump rotor a twist. It spun with buttery smoothness with not a hint of grinding. Granted, things that are imperceptible at an insignificant RPM, might manifest themselves in a more dramatic manner when this thing is running at full tilt under load conditions, maybe somewhere in the neighborhood of 40,000 RPM.

I did have a slight concern about the bit of oil found at the outlet port. The oiling system consists of two bearing chambers on either side of the motor, which have some sort of wicking material to provide the bearings with lubrication. Based on the internal profile drawing found in the manual, there only appeared to be a sort of splash shield separating the bearing chamber and the rotor/stator section of the pump, which seemed slightly bizarre to me considering that it is acceptable to mount the pump on it's side. I don't think anything is actually wrong, but I can't say for sure.

All that said, first impressions are overall quite positive. I have reasonable confidence that the pump is in good, operatable condition. However, I will at least give it an oil change.