Alright, the deed is kind of done.
I actually physically transported two 5890s(one with the 5971 and FID, the other with an NPD and ECD) from one university to another, and spent the day getting them situated in their new home.
Both had been under a service contract a few years ago, but I was told that they'd not been used since he last visited. I PROBABLY could have skipped the source cleaning on the 5971, but figured I didn't have anything.
It really was just about like the 5975 and the whole thing was straight forward. It also looked to have minimal time since the last service as the repeller and lenses were spotless. There was some discoloration next to one of the filaments-I've been told that this is probably one of the least important places to clean(and also that the repeller is most important) but I've always polished it anyway. I did give the repeller and everything else a quick alumina/methanol polish, but it didn't take me that much work.
Unfortunately, the issues arose when I started powering it up. The computer didn't have a hard drive in it, and the best they could figure was that the last service guy had adopted a "scorch earth" policy when they discontinued the contract. So, I'm going to be hunting down a copy of MSD ChemStation A or B and I also need at least the NIST library. The PI mentioned that he had a couple of other libraries, but I'm guessing anything beyond NIST might be difficult. In any case, I left it with 1psi of head pressure and the rough pump running, so it should hopefully come right up with software.
Fortunately, the ECD/NPD unit mostly came right up. I was worried about the NPD, but the PI told me that he'd needed to burn money on a grant years ago and had bought a bunch of spare beads. He also was set up to recoat them. That was all in storage, but I was able to get peaks on the standard I used(diethyl amine, ethylene diamine, and triphenylphospine) after heating the bead for an hour and at a setting of around 600.
I did have a bit of a weird problem with the autosampler on the ECD (both instruments are configured with a tower on each inlet). The tray would pick up and place the specified vial in the tower(rear injector for the ECD) but it would just stop there. The "ready" light would remain green on the tower-just nothing else would happen. I'm not sure where the problem was, as I swapped towers all around and all four towers worked fine on the front inlet but gave the same behavior on the rear inlet. The only thing I didn't try was swapping the 7673 control boxes between the systems. In any case, I ended up making a manual injection into the ECD column and it was fine.