I spent the afternoon with Nick and Colin testing the 15G that we nickel plated. It took most of the afternoon to get the Varian leak detector to stabilize because we just brought it in from COLD storage (it was about 20F here today) and it took several hours to get the darn thing up to room temp and for the machine to stabilize.
After we got things running, we hooked the subject tube up to the leak detector and began looking for leaks. We did not find any. So we took another tube that we had found leaks on during a previous leak detecting session and sure enough we were able to re-locate the leaks on that tube. So we went back to the tube which we plated with nickel and we still did not detect any leaks.
WE therefore must conclude that the tube we nickel plated, has been sealed of any detectable leaks, at least leaks of a detectable size that our leak detector can find.
Here are some photos and a small video whereby I do an empiracle test to see that we actually are using helium and not some other type of gas.
Click this link to view the "empriacle helium test"
http://miniman82.4t.com/video/helium.mp4