#in the end a stalactite formed in their acousto-optic modulator | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

random2908 · 2 years ago

Text

You know, sometimes I’m grateful that my first summer in my graduate lab, at the impressionable age of 22, my main assignment was to design and build a full closed-loop water cooling system, with a chiller whose heat exchanger had to also be connected to the building cold water system (which, if you screwed it up, had enough water flow that you could flood the whole lab). And I gained familiarity with all the main types of hose, tube, and pipe connectors and how to install them.

I also learned the very important life lesson of, if all else fails, a blow torch can solve nearly any problem. I think I solved three different problems with a blow torch that summer.

No home plumbing I might undertake will match the disasters I ran into that summer.

#I couldn't get my pipe threads to stop leaking no matter how much I tightened them or added or subtracted teflon tape #so in the end I soldered them #I've never had to do that at home #so I feel like home plumbing is consistently easy #someday I should tell the story of the students at the table next to me #who used sink water to cool their electronics #rather than my closed-loop distilled water system #where the building water was only on the other side of the heat exchanger--never going through my delicate electronics and lasers #because the thing is... tap water has all sorts of junk in it #iron and calcium carbonate to name two of the most common ones #calcium carbonate... also known as lime #and if you run it through a narrow tube for years on end...#well you can end up creating your own limestone caverns #in the end a stalactite formed in their acousto-optic modulator #big enough to break the gasket seal #so suddenly their AOM was leaking water all over their optics table

17 notes · View notes