Possibly build that ketene lamp if I don't do it tonight.
I get paid tomorrow, need to pay rent, buy food because there is next to nothing left. Two pot noodles, one of which is likely to go in the bin since its been near certain nasty things, such as HgCl2 and Hg (II) sulfate. Not to mention a bunch of triethylenetetramine acetate, that I'd not want to eat, copper (II) chloride, nickel salts and other stuff, with the lid off. No thanks. I'd have to be a lot more desperate to eat than waiting a day for a proper meal. Well a night. And might well have gotten various metals in it in the form of ultra-fine dusts that are nigh impossible to see with the naked eye in small quantities. Nickel included, which is fairly toxic, although not nearly as bad as the divalent mercury salts.
Sod eating that right off. I'll have the other one though since its sealed still.
Unless someone snags it before tomorrow, then buy a pair of power supplies going for 20 quid each, one of them a 1 kilowatt supply.
Put some money aside for buying a second-hand fourier-transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometer. About 8 grand currently on lab X.Thats within my price range with a lot of saving. Already wanted to build one, might try that first and buy the power supplies plus a beasty vacuum pump, since I want one that can go down to a fraction of a 1 Torr and some roughing pumps to kickstart it. A dewar is on the list too, for storing liquid helium or liquid nitrogen. The additional vac pumps are because I want at least one spare, and better than the pump I have now, which will go down to something like -25 inches Hg. Want a new manometer, one that I can interface with a vacuum manifold for the glassware and not just use as part of a vacuum chamber system (DIY'ed, the pump may actually be capable of better, just a rotary vane type that I have. I'd like something capable of pumping down a vacuum chamber to the sort of hard, hard vacuum that a mercury diffusion pump after a turbomolecular pump, kickstarted by liquid nitrogen trap line-cooled rotary vane types in series or other, better pump designs.
http://www.labx.com/item/bruker-9-4t-ft-icr-small-molecule-mass-spec-system/3875391 Going to submit a query to the seller of this too, ask him if he might save it whilst I save for it, even if I need to pay extra, because I have wanted a FT-ICR MS or FT-IR MS-MS for ages. Although it isn't impossible I could build the hardware, the software side, the driver coding for interfacing to a computer are something else entirely, I'm no computer programmer, bar some knowledge of MS-DOS batch language (to about the extent I can write selfreplicating viral code in it with errorchecking for prior infection although its been a long time since I have actually coded a worm in it. School days, I let a few loose that raised hell. Including one designed to spread then wipe out the contents of the hard drive without warning with a delay. That was amusing as hell although I kinda ended up breaking one of the care staff's fingers over that (she made it her own fault really putting them somewhere she shouldn't have, if she had half a brain.
But coding the drivers for an ion cyclotron resonance mass spec...I could see how it would have to work, but I don't have the familiarity with low level assembly languages or 0x86 machine opcodes, the voltage induction and decay detection I could likely learn, but the output and doing the fourier transform on the input signal from an oscilloscope is another matter (data is created by the increase of charged particles orbit radius in a penning trap, a kind of magnetic bottle, and RF acceleration, to a higher cyclotron resonance frequency and wider orbit, which would cause the fragments of molecular ions to orbit at a wider radius and the charge on them as they then pass a pair of electrodes and its subsequent decay gives data as a superposition of unique sine waveform patterns that are subjected to fourier transform to yield the mass spectrum of the analyte/s.
Need a big block of cast iron or stainless steel (better for my needs) plus a steel bar I can thread for more lab supports for my clamps, preferably a few, plus some Al blocks for a PCR thermocycler.
