Shocking revelation for everyone: stuff breaks in science labs, all the freaking time. I know, I know. Stay with me here.
Anyway, the other day I was attempting to fix some broken stuff in my optics lab. Well, maybe not “my” optics lab, but the one I work in every day. Yeah, that one. A number of little things had broken or at least were not working, and it all piled up into one big explosion of broken.
Okay, not THAT big an explosion of broken.
While a few broken things can almost always be ignored (I’ve met many a science experiment held together by tape), some of them really, really can’t. One of those is anything that causes you to lose signal completely. On Thursday, I had one of those on the optical path, as well as another one on the temperature sensor. So here I was, hoping to measure optical signals as a function of temperature, without knowing the temperature or the optical signal. Yeah.
Anyway, for the optical signal, I spent a good couple hours troubleshooting detectors and amplifiers, moving around optics, even checking the monochromator…no signal. I quit in frustration and went and read comics on the internet for half an hour. Grrrr, stupid experiment, grrrr. Then I went back into the lab, pretty much prepared to just take a cursory second look and then turn things off for the day, when I found the problem.
I had a shutter closed. A shutter that’s intended to completely block the signal when you want it to.
Yeah, I’m an idiot.
In my defense, I never use that shutter, and the fact that it was closed was probably a complete accident. Nonetheless, I ended up largely dismantling a sensitive system in search of a problem that didn’t actually exist. It took me another hour or more to put everything right.
After fixing the first nonexistent problem, I was feeling elated, although rather silly to be sure. I moved on to repairing the temperature sensor. Taking a first look at it, I was confronted by a huge tangle of wires, some of which were severed. I retreated quickly into looking up a .pdf of the user’s manual for the temperature controller online. It was largely unhelpful, but it did let me at least hazard a guess at what some of the tangle was for.
So, back into the fray I went. After a bit of investigation, it was pretty easy to tell which wires did which, and since I’m a big smart scientist and all, I knew that the broken ones needed to be reconnected. Yay! Except they’re temperature sensitive, so soldering was out. And oh yeah, one minor detail: they’re the tiniest wires I’ve seen. I had to strip the coating off these mini-wires, and twist them back together, then protect the join. Not hard really normally, except I could barely see this wires they were so thin, and I had to work in the dark (another optical experiment was running).
I felt like The Hulk trying to play the piccolo.
These hands were made for smashing, not for delicate music.
So that took a little longer that I might have hoped, and the wires got a little shorter on the way than originally planned. Fun times. But guess what? After hours of repairs that weren’t always necessary, the experiment WORKS BITCHES. HAH!
When you ask me why my PhD takes so long, now you know.
