Progress on the VBO A leak test retrofit has been going well. I made a bit of an oversight and had to replace the HPS 903 vacuum gauge with an HPS 431 vacuum gauge to go with the existing controller. The SRS RGA software continues to be a pain, I updated it to version 3.2. The update from 3.0 to 3.2 required updating to .NET 2 which required .NET 1 which required updating to Windows 2000 SP5 (unofficial) which required an update to Windows 2000 SP4 (official), I feel like the old lady who swallowed a fly. The SRS software is still a pain though.

Tested out the cold trap, one can see on the attached graphs (first one is after 15 minutes, second is after 150 minutes) the water vapor load is fairly heavy and will most likely only improve with a bakeout. Most likely there are "wet" parts upstream of the cold trap. After 6 hours of pump-down the system was holding steady at 7.2e-8 torr. A quick leak check found no grievous leaks, although a more thorough check wouldn't hurt before wrapping it up with heat tape. 

The LN2 cold trap won't be cold enough to significantly pump down on Argon so I should also work on fashioning a bag to sit over the Viton seal (since air and more importantly Argon seems to permeate at a slow rate) and create a Nitrogen shield.