Not recently. Atmospheric EB has been around for a long time. Leybold started in the 60's and by the 70's a few companies had machines. Band saw blade welding i

Not recently. Atmospheric EB has been around for a long time. Leybold started in the 60's and by the 70's a few companies had machines. Band saw blade welding is one of the big users of atmospheric EB. The big problem with ATM EB is that the beam diffuses in the air rapidly so you have a few usable cm from the aperture to the work piece. The machines work by using a standard EB column with a turbo or diffusion pumped gun chamber firing down a baffled tube, each baffle having a small hole for the beam to pass and the space between the baffles is pumped by large vacuum pumps. PTR had a picture of such a machine and you can see a big umbilical of vacuum hoses snaking from the head to a battery of large Stokes piston vacuum pumps. Each baffle successively reduces the atmosphere leaking in until the isolation valve can be opened and the head can maintain enough vacuum to prevent flash over arcing. A lot of that big stuff you see like pressure vessel welding uses reduced atmosphere welding where a small space is sealed as best as possible so the pressure can be reduced below 1 pascal (1E-2 Torr.) Then a standard pumped welding head can be used. The more recent development was the plasma arc window stuff Brookhaven national labs did with Joining Tech (knew someone who worked for them when that project was active) though I know of no manufacturer using it.