I’ve been wanting to write this post for a long time. I think about it every time we get a call or email from someone who wants to talk about an application that’s a little “outside the box” or just making contact to learn more about what we do. The conversation always follows a similar pattern through which they explain what’s needed and I get to offer advice based on my experience, or lack there of, with that type of work. Every time I think I’ve heard it all, I’ll get a call for something completely new. It’s a fascinating world we live in and a great time to be a scientist. That brings me to my point, these callers always seem surprised that when they call, the phone is answered by someone who is technically knowledgeable, at least familiar with the science and quite happy to talk at length about their needs. I tell them all the same thing, “This isn’t just a job, we live for this stuff.”

CNC machining is a relatively small part of what we do at KSA and Texray, but it’s a personal hobby I enjoy quite a bit. I’ve cut many of these SS branding iron heads friends and charity auctions. They’re fun, not too complicated and really cool.

Preventative maintenance has always been a difficult subject for me. The manufacturers all recommend an annual visit to go over their instruments in the hopes that small issues would be dealt with before they became large issues, but it’s never easy to tell a client that their perfectly functional system requires thousands of dollars in maintenance. That being said, over the last 40 years, we’ve performed countless PM routines all over the world on at least 13 different models of XRD and XRF instrumentation and almost every one of those visits has turned up at least one issue which needed attention for one reason or another. This will be the first of several posts detailing various problems we’ve encountered during these visits.

A long time client at one of our most prestigious national laboratories had gone several years without any maintenance being performed on their Siemens D500. Over that time, corrosion built up in this small receiving area before the incident beam optics. I should be very clear that this has no effect on the shutter assembly, fail-safe features or safety in general. However, if left unchecked, flakes will eventually fall into the beam path. The symptom is simply that intensities are lower. This is not the first time we’ve been called out to replace a tube only to find that the low intensities were due to attenuation. Running through a basic PM before installing the new tube saved $6000 of your tax dollars.