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Most of the lab equipment seems to be broken right now.
Our old HP 1090 HPLC broke down with a mysterious error related to the metering pumps, and it looks like we’ll be waiting a week or more, and paying a lot of money, for an engineer to come to try to fix it.
The Voyager MALDI-TOF mass spectrometer developed some sort of vacuum leak yesterday. At some point in the sample plate load/eject cycle it ends up venting the high vacuum, causing the turbomolecular pumps to spin down rapidly and the ion gauges to shut off due to high pressure, generating a bunch of warnings from the software. That instrument is under service contract, which means that in exchange for a rather huge annual fee Applied Biosystems promises that if it breaks, they’ll send someone out promptly to fix it. The HPLC doesn’t need nearly enough repair to justify the cost of a service contract, but you can bet that nearly every year the mass spectrometer will require replacement of something very expensive, so the contract works out pretty well. This year it looks like we are getting our money’s worth: They put a new laser in just a week ago. The engineer expects to see us Monday, bringing his large case of tools and his ability to have parts shipped overnight.
I think that the protein sequencer is working, though I had to wash out a clog in the R2 (diisopropylethylamine) vent line this morning. At least something is working.
Our old HP 1090 HPLC broke down with a mysterious error related to the metering pumps, and it looks like we’ll be waiting a week or more, and paying a lot of money, for an engineer to come to try to fix it.
The Voyager MALDI-TOF mass spectrometer developed some sort of vacuum leak yesterday. At some point in the sample plate load/eject cycle it ends up venting the high vacuum, causing the turbomolecular pumps to spin down rapidly and the ion gauges to shut off due to high pressure, generating a bunch of warnings from the software. That instrument is under service contract, which means that in exchange for a rather huge annual fee Applied Biosystems promises that if it breaks, they’ll send someone out promptly to fix it. The HPLC doesn’t need nearly enough repair to justify the cost of a service contract, but you can bet that nearly every year the mass spectrometer will require replacement of something very expensive, so the contract works out pretty well. This year it looks like we are getting our money’s worth: They put a new laser in just a week ago. The engineer expects to see us Monday, bringing his large case of tools and his ability to have parts shipped overnight.
I think that the protein sequencer is working, though I had to wash out a clog in the R2 (diisopropylethylamine) vent line this morning. At least something is working.
