AMEN (and pass the H2SO4) to this thread!
I'm a recovering Marketing executive in Silicon Valley, now a garage Mad
Scientist, building a catalytic reactor in my garage, much to my wife's
chagrin. ;-)
A) There are very few helpful publications. The Journal of Chemical
Education, which one writer mentioned, is TERRIFIC. I have electronic
access to it, through a buddy who's a chem prof at Stanford, and have
copies of many articles from it -- how to build your own ______ out of
stuff you can buy at Home Depot. There's also a physics journal - I forget
the name at the moment, but it's focused on practical lab stuff. Found a
nice design for a power supply there.
Also, the old "Amateur Scientist" column from Scientific American is
great. Available on CD-ROM, or microfilm at your local library. More on
that in a second.
B) Commercial lab equipment is SICK expensive. I used to write lab info
systems for a biotech company (my old boss was on Jon Stewart last night,
discussing cow clones!), which needed benchtop grinders to grind
desiccated plant samples for DNA analysis. A few thousand US$ apiece, and
they had to be cleaned after every use, and we did about a million samples
a year -- quite a bottleneck. Found out that the Krups coffee grinder
actually did a better job, was easier to clean, and cost $20. We bought
like 14 of them.
I've started blowing some simple glassware with a hardware-store propane
torch and Pyrex tubing I get for about $7 per meter at a local
chemistry-hobbyist supply shop (one of the last, I suspect!) I'm building
a gas chromatograph (per 2 articles in SciAm columns from the 60s), out of
cement-board from Home Depot, Tide detergent, an old toaster oven from
Goodwill, a big cork from my wife's bath-crystals, 12-ga copper wire left
over from a light-switch replacement, and a Coleman lantern replacement
glass cylinder from Ace. My data collector/plotter is an eBay'd Texas
Instruments "CBL" with photodetector ($29.30) and a cable to my laptop.
For a lab scale, and catalyst sup****t (stainless-steel fine-mesh screens -
about $130 for a 5-pack at Cole-Parmer) -- I visited my friendly
neighborhood head shop....errr.... "tobacco accessory store". $27 for a
digital scale that's good down to +/- 0.01g, and $2-3 for 10 screens.
(They also stock lots of small bits of pyrex tubing for
bong....errr... "tobacco pipe" .... construction, some with ground glass
fittings! Gotta love the counterculture entrepreneurial ethic!)
My biggest expense so far is the tank of nitrogen and the regulator for it
-- I'm not going to skimp on 2200-psi equipment. ;-) Anything stainless
steel is also pricey -- but surplus places are GREAT.
C) One thing I'd LOVE is a pointer to a book, resource, etc., on
constructing lab setups. I've read about 200+ journal articles with "so we
built a reactor out of 316 stainless..." ...yadda yadda, as if that's
obvious knowledge -- only, after searching through course descriptions at
MIT, Caltech, etc, and many books -- I've yet to find something like
"Practical Laboratory Chemical Engineering Benchtop System Design and
Fabrication".
Best I've found thus far is a paper from some guys at Caltech. (Google
"Caltech", "JP-10", and "rotameter" and you'll get the exact paper, PDF,
as the only hit. You're welcome! ;-) It details the entire setup, down to
the part numbers, schematic, pictures, etc., of their lab device.
Also, old books (e.g., The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments, or
something like that, which I'm happy to send anyone in .PDF) and magazines
(see blog.modernmechanix.com, click on chemistry), are huge helps.
Finally, check out makezine.com and instructables.com (search for "lathe"
on the latter to see another of my projects). Mostly not chemistry, but
potentially hugely helpful community.
Any follow-up WELCOMED -- corradini (then the "at" sign, then Yahoo, then
a period, then "com".
On Tue, 09 Jan 2007 01:27:01 +0000, vjp2.at wrote:
> Pardon if I'm wrong, but, methinks, We should cross post to the sci edu
group.
>
> *+- Another thought: what's the chem lab found in every home? The
KITCHEN. In
> *+-plant visits course, we went to the old General Foods lab in
Tarrytown, which
> *+-used to hire a few of our grads. This is no small thought. My dad's
older
> *+-brother is considered to have played a major role in the rise of
modern Greek
> *+-science by introducing a rather simple teaching technique for
> *+-then-highly-rural students: the school garden.
>
> *+- The other thing is MICROFLUIDICS is changing a lot. You can have
safer
> *+-school labs using smaller quanities. When we went to big pharma in
my plant
> *+-visits course, there was this huge lab that dropped many antiobiotic
> *+-candidates on a matrix of many bacteria. Well, today the entire thing
(high
> *+-throughput screening) is the size of my late mom's original
Cuisinart.
> *+-There's a blood test device (the size of a 1970s home computer) you
find in
> *+-every chemotherapy clinic which costs about a hundred grand.
>
> *+- There is a big popular PHOBIA of chem and bio. We need to overcome
it in
> *+-order to keep our competitive edge. But also, there is an OLIGOPSONY
of a lot
> *+-of the gadetry which keeps it expensive. I was working with some
"energy"
> *+-consultants and we got a thirty buck (kill-o-watt, methinks it's
called)
> *+-meter you can measure how much every gadget spends in electricity.
Then we
> *+-tried to get a similar Doppler meter for HVAC and plumbing and found
it cost
> *+-two grand refurb. The blood test device above is cost effective
enough to put
> *+-in a lot of group practices, yet they still send out to labs, at much
higher
> *+-per-patient cost. We need to encourgae more of a garage mentality in
> *+-chem/bio, but the bloody media is our biggest enemy. Folks have no
idea how
> *+-much they would save in med costs if we had more such "garages".
>
> *+- Sciplus.com is a cool source for lab supplies.
> *+-(I use "guerrilla" management techniques for startups.)
>
> *+-You hit on a serious problem. My NSPE chapter is trying to set up a
program
> *+-for HS students. Even the software (CAD, CFD, Sim) is overpriced.
There is a
> *+-bit of Freeware (octave.org, sourceforge.net, bloodshed.net,
> *+-http://www-rocq.inria.fr/OpenFEM)
out there, though. I would try to
stick
> *+-with stuff that works inside a MatLab clone. (Despite Codd&Date's
attempts
> *+-on referential integrity two decades ago, the major cost of using
computers
> *+-is still transfering data between programs) I've heard it claimed no
one does
> *+-pilot plants any more, thanks to simulation, but someone answered, no
one
> *+-builds new refineries in the states anyways. 5dollarsoftware.com has
an EE
> *+-CD with an early free trial version of IntelliCAD, compat w AutoCAD
2000.
> *+-COADE CADWorx it's not, though.
>
> - = -
> Vasos Panagiotopoulos, Columbia'81+, Reagan, Mozart, Pindus,
BioStrategist
> http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/vjp2/vasos.htm
> ---{Nothing herein constitutes advice. Everything fully
disclaimed.}---
> [Homeland Security means private firearms not lazy obstructive
guards]
> [Urb sprawl confounds terror] [Remorse begets zeal] [Windows is for
Bimbos]
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