So I've had this old pump in storage for at least 10 yrs

[juddc]

...probably more like 15 & I've never even so much as turned it on. I got it in a pile of equipement from an aquisition the company made and it was old then, but I thought I would hold onto it just because it looked so similar to the nice 600's I was working with at the time.

Fast forward to today: I'm reading a couple of papers that entail some post column derivitization and I pretty much have all of the equipement I need, but a little isocratic pump would be ideal for reagent delivery and I remember that little ancient orphaned pump.

It's a Waters 590, circa 1980 or so.

Long story short, I go deep into the bowels of the basement, find the little beast, clean it up a bit, and power it up.

It actually seemed happy to be alive.

OK, the electronics work. So I give it a few minutes to warm up then loosen a few compression screws and push some methanol through with a syringe until it's good and wet all over, then gave a shot at priming. Hey! It seems to be pumping smoothly and it'll push a nice stream at 5 ml/min, so I back it down to ~ 1 ml/min and install a column.

Pressure ripple is ~10 psi at ~900 psi. Really??

OK. Check flow rate with column installed:

Set rate 2.000 ml/min. Pressure: ~1750 psi.

Observed flow rate: 1.93 ml/min and running smooth as a baby's bottom.

Nice! Free pump for me - and oddly I like the SS piston indicator rods on the thing...they look a bit more macho than the standard 600 fare...

Thanks to whomever worked at Waters 30 years ago and built that pump!

[JGK]

I'm working with some waters 510's at the moment and they're as reliable as anything I've used previously.

I resurected two from a ~3 year hiatus on a lab bench, powered them up and, in flow testing (individually and as a binary unit) got <2% variation from nominal flow.

[Gerhard Kratz]

If had similar experiance, but with a 64 pump from Knauer. Pump was 15 years old, always used for students at Botanic institute of Wuerzburg university. To help them out I did maintenance on that pump, and it is still runnign, so far I know. That was 21 years ago.

[Anthony Squibb]

I used to use an old Beckmann Gold system until 2005 when I changed groups. The system ran well and was an absolute godsend to our group.