Somewhere between yesterday’s posts about uselesss junk and useful antiques, there’s this. The picture to the right is a tragedy in progress, though is might not look that way: It’s an FTIR spectrometer left behind by the previous occupant of my lab.
It’s a top-of-the-line instrument, a Bomem DA-8 spectrophotometer, and a new one will set you back better than $100,000. It’s no use to me, though, as it’s designed to make measurements of spectra in the far infrared– wavelengths of a couple of microns or more, well past the 800 nm sort of range where I work. So it sits there in the lab, next to one of the optical tables, and ocasionally things get piled on top of it.
I actually made an effort to find somebody to buy it a couple of years ago, and thought I had a buyer, but the deal fell through, so it’s still there. If you know anybody who would want one of these, have them contact me, because I’ll sell it for a reasonable price.
(In a similarly crass commercial vein, we also have a picosecond pulsed YAG and dye laser system, left behind by the same guy. Again, it’s just taking up space in our storage room (you can see a bit of it in the picture in the “Lab Relics” post), so if you’ve got a use for it, let me know…)
Know any other stories of good equipment tragically going to waste? Leave them in the comments.