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- Posts: 2
- Joined: Fri Oct 07, 2011 8:45 am
Hello,
I’m a phd student (Tuebingen university, Germany) working on a TraceGC 2000 gas chromatograph coupled to a TraceDSQ single quadrupole mass spectrometric detector (Thermo Finnigan).
During our usual maintenance before Christmas, many many problems occurred (last problem: we couldn't detect high masses), which made it necessary to call a technician from Thermo. Before calling him, we decided to clean again the source (Aluminium oxice powder and so on), and cleaned the quadrupole with methanol (logbook entries said, that people did it before). Doing that we noticed, that one of the four electrodes was loose (the srews where tight, but one electrode was moving). Then we did a really stupid thing: We unscrewed the four electrodes. The screw from the loose electrode broke and now stucks in the electrode.
From Thermo we got the information, that we need a complete new quadrupole and there is no way to replace just the electrode. They have a possibility to organize a quadrupole for less than 10000€ (a new one would be around 25000€), but that is still too expensive for our working group.
So now my questions: Do you have any other idea, what we can do or is there really only the way to replace the whole quadrupole? Maybe you know some other companies that can repair the quadrupole? And do you think, that the loose electrode alone would have been a reason to replace the quadrupole?
Thank you so much
Karin
I’m a phd student (Tuebingen university, Germany) working on a TraceGC 2000 gas chromatograph coupled to a TraceDSQ single quadrupole mass spectrometric detector (Thermo Finnigan).
During our usual maintenance before Christmas, many many problems occurred (last problem: we couldn't detect high masses), which made it necessary to call a technician from Thermo. Before calling him, we decided to clean again the source (Aluminium oxice powder and so on), and cleaned the quadrupole with methanol (logbook entries said, that people did it before). Doing that we noticed, that one of the four electrodes was loose (the srews where tight, but one electrode was moving). Then we did a really stupid thing: We unscrewed the four electrodes. The screw from the loose electrode broke and now stucks in the electrode.
From Thermo we got the information, that we need a complete new quadrupole and there is no way to replace just the electrode. They have a possibility to organize a quadrupole for less than 10000€ (a new one would be around 25000€), but that is still too expensive for our working group.
So now my questions: Do you have any other idea, what we can do or is there really only the way to replace the whole quadrupole? Maybe you know some other companies that can repair the quadrupole? And do you think, that the loose electrode alone would have been a reason to replace the quadrupole?
Thank you so much
Karin
