week of 01/27/25-01/31/25
1/28 The chemistry department has run out of acetone, once again. The 55 gallon drum was emptied on tuesday afternoon by yours truly, and a new drum is on order. I got the last 10 liters, and now I'm relying on the 25 liters of reserve acetone I store in the lab. I did give away 4 liters of acetone though, so we're down to 21 liters.
1/29
I got a job as a lab assistant. Things have been slow lately, though I did get three hours of work in, cleaning glassware and setting up the prep room for the routine maintenance of the GC-MS, I will be tasked to take apart and cleanin the quadrupole mass filter. Cleaning up that prep room is going to be a nightmare though, its a messy room and there's just so much stuff to move. allegedly, MSD maintenance is going to be about two hours, and I'll be spending a whole bunch of time cleaning, as well as repairing my lab's cork borer, which was designated as a safety hazard by EH&S due to a dry-rotted power cord. I will need to replace that cord, but I need to be supervised to do.
1/30
I spent the first half of the day cleaning up the upper division prep room. I've made good progress in clearing out the benches, but the deluge of glassware is endless. I've also cleaned up some lab materials from last fall, which I was surprised wasn't cleaned up sooner. I'm mostly left to clean and work on my own which is a bit scary for me. I'm used to unsupervised research, but working for a wage unsupervised feels odd to me.
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The second half of the day is spent cleaning the electron-impact ion source on the Agilent 5973 MSD. I was shown how to disassemble the ion source for cleaning, and I was tasked to clean the ion source by using 15μm alumina powder and methanol. Turns out, blasting organic molecules apart with a 70eV electron beam absolutely obliterates them, and the resulting ions get accelerated down the ion beam into the quadrupole, but the neutral fragments coat absolutely every surface in the ion source with a tar from hell. That tar is then baked onto the stainless steel components of the ion source at 250 celsius for months at a time. And now it falls to me to clean it. Over the course of three hours, I methodically clean the parts by wetting a q-tip in methanol and dipping it into the alumina, and then methodically abrading the tar layer off the ion source parts. The nerve-wracking part comes with the fact that each part is hundreds of dollars, and I have to put a considerable amount of force to clean the part. for flat parts, I put abrasive on a fine grit sandpaper and lap the part until clean. Afterwards, the parts will be sonicated and cleaned.
1/31
I'm reassembling the MSD ion source today. I've never re-assembled anything that clean before. But, before I could reassemble the ion source, I sonicated the parts, twice in methanol to loosen any abrasive, then acetone and methylene chloride.\ While the ion source was sonicating, I had to move a refrigerator into a biochem lab from the upper division lab prep room. That was uneventful, and a good change of pace from the meticulous cleaning I needed to do for the ion source.
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I dried the parts, went out for lunch, came back and re-assembled the ion source, taking care not to damage the filaments, the bakelite ion optic insulators, and the heating element. I accidentally screwed the heating element in backwards, so I took it apart and properly reassembled it. I then changed the oil in the vacuum pump and carefully re-inserted the ion source. I connected all the wires, and then the MSD was pumped down, and I finished the job. I have never had such a nerve-wracking experience assembling something that costs more than a month's work.
Retrospective: I had a pretty busy week. I'm glad that I was trusted with the complex task of maintaining the GC-MS, and I proved (mostly to myself) that all those years of tinkering paid off handsomely, and I'm getting quite a few hours of work in, which is a relief for me. I hope to fix more things, though it seems that I'm probably gonna be on a cleaning/moving shit around rotation for the next few weeks. Research is gonna start off slow, as I need to review my research lab's grant proposal and see my PI once I get an idea of what my next project will be.