What kind of tubing and valves?
Somewhat surprisingly, $5 valves from the local hardware store work perfectly well. You must seal the threaded joints. I used Teflon tape rather liberally, and didn’t experiment to see what else would work. Be warned that $12 will buy you a vacuum gauge which can be relied upon to tell you whether you have excellent, good, fair, poor, or no vacuum. Don’t rely on the numbers on the face. At all. Do try to buy one that actually starts from zero. Tubing can be bought from the same place you get your vacuum pump at a really outlandish cost, or you can just go to the auto parts store and get thick-walled rubber tubing. I imagine if you’re also going to do high-vacuum work, you probably care about the volatiles in the rubber outgassing. On the other hand, with the amount of water vapor you’re going to be sucking into your pump oil, you might want to reconsider what your ultimate vacuum will be…
