5 Minute Lab
Welcome to 5minutelab. The primary purpose of this site is to discuss ways of quickly equipping a laboratory at minimal cost. This might include researchers with very restricted funding or perhaps those interested in building a home laboratory. A main focus will be on analytical support equipment such as bench items, HPLC, simple robotics, etc., but not necessarily restricted to that. As this site develops it will include several types of material such as:
- Sources of used equipment such as LabX, government sites, ebay, etc. and things to watch out for.
- A page of older instrument manuals available for free download. There are currently a few listed at the Manuals link above. User and service manuals for older equipment are always helpful and sometimes essential, so donations to help others are encouraged.
- Some ways of retraining things to do what they weren't designed to do with (usually) good results and minimal bloodshed.
- Communicating with and controlling older equipment using serial (RS232) communications.
- Approaches to making various devices using simple electronics, coding, 3D printing, and machining.
All comments, questions and suggestions are welcome. If you know of a good source or technique, or if you have a question about some apparatus, leave a comment. And if you can answer someone elses' question please take a minute to do so. There's a wealth of information available, but finding it can sometimes be daunting.
Equipping an Analytical Chemistry Lab at Minimal Cost
Part 1. Old but functional. 11/8/2024
As everyone knows, new laboratory equipment can be very expensive. Those fortunate enough to have strong grant support will be able to purchase such equipment with that funding and manufacturers likely take that into account in their pricing. Consequently, lab equipment is usually high quality and well built, but the costs can be substantial. Years ago before Hewlett Packard instrumentation was spun off as Agilent, the HP logo was described even by their own people as standing for High Price
. HP analytical equipment was outstanding but definitely not inexpensive. Lately, there has been some interest in home made equipment, usually items of a relatively simple nature such as microcentrifuges, often involving 3D printed parts. Several websites exist that focus on the open source design of DIY laboratory equipment with a few linked here. Some clever and interesting devices have been described, but they are largely limited to original DIY designs of relatively simple items and exclude more complex instrumentation such as chromatographs, scanning UV spectrophotometers, microplate readers, and so on.
However, for an interesting example of someone far exceeding the usual limitations of DIY lab construction see the video by Ben Krasnow on his Applied Science Channel where he describes building and using a magnetic sector mass spectrometer from some parts on hand in his workshop. Both Ben and his workshop (apparently with spare oil diffusion and turbomolecular pumps lying around) are obviously the rare exception. Most of us lack both the expertise and varied resources for such work. Some common devices such as 3 or 4 place analytical balances can be purchased online at relatively low cost (a few hundred dollars) from suppliers in China, and some of them seem reasonably accurate and precise, but most specialized equipment is just not available for less than thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars. An obvious approach to this problem is to consider used equipment.
Scientific and technical instruments always evolve. In most cases the newer versions are better and both more capable and reliable, and this evolution has accelerated with the use of advanced microprocessors and computer control. As a result, there are always older instruments that have been displaced while still functional. Probably many are just junked, however others find their way into the resale market. This can be a perilous place, but for those with some familiarity with analytical instruments, some of that displaced equipment can still be useful. After all, the mechanical components such as the optical path in a spectrophotometer or the transport mechanism of a syringe pump is likely independent of improvements in the electronics, and such mechanical OEM components are typically fine. In fact, they may be as good as -- if not better than -- similar parts in some newer instruments.
Part 2 will describe some sources of used equipment and also some pitfalls to watch for.