Oldest Instrument

[MSCHemist]

Yep I like my 5890 Series II. I just rebuilt the computer. Slapping in a 200gb HDD, DVD-R drive. PCI USB2.0 card, Windows 2000, Reinstalled Chemstation MSD B.02, and ordered 3X256mb of SDRAM for it (It currently has 96mb).

[MSCHemist]

In grad school about 8 or so years ago we had a software driven microbalance we used to measure changes in surface pressure of a little black piece of metal just touching a surface of aqueous buffer with a lipid monolayer. It would only work with a 286 computer that would constantly crash and destroy your experiment. I spent a full week trying to get it to talk to a Pentium I only to give up.

[davidobaumann]

Some spectra made by the 337

I really cannot believe that your PE 337 is still running, usually the thermocouples loose vacuum and that's the end since Perkin Elmer does not make these components any more. I have a 2 PE 1600 FTIR's that are currently operational and a PE 1310 that I need to put a new pyroelectric detector in again since it died.

[James_Ball]

In grad school about 8 or so years ago we had a software driven microbalance we used to measure changes in surface pressure of a little black piece of metal just touching a surface of aqueous buffer with a lipid monolayer. It would only work with a 286 computer that would constantly crash and destroy your experiment. I spent a full week trying to get it to talk to a Pentium I only to give up.

I had one of these back in my undergrad/grad work at WKU. It was the Kahn Micro Balance I believe. We were doing adsorption experiments on coal, where the balance was enclosed in a vacuum chamber and you let in small amounts of benzene or pyridine and measures adsorption rates. I had to build a temperature controlled enclosure for it and it was also running on a 286 computer that I had to write a BASIC program for it to collect data at certain time intervals then convert them to VisiCalc spreadsheets then plot them in Harvard Graphics. So much fun back then to make thing work

[Scifi]

Some spectra made by the 337

I really cannot believe that your PE 337 is still running, usually the thermocouples loose vacuum and that's the end since Perkin Elmer does not make these components any more. I have a 2 PE 1600 FTIR's that are currently operational and a PE 1310 that I need to put a new pyroelectric detector in again since it died.

The thermocouple probably did lose vacuum. The signal from it seems to be very low. Some modifications were done so it could draw spectra. I read in an article that air filled thermocouples can work, but they have one tenth the sensitivity as vacuum thermocouples.