I love it when a plan comes together.

Or at least when you are trying to fix things and actually succeed. New power supply was there when I showed up Tuesday morning.

Tuesday: Soldered on new leads as it is much smaller than the one it replaces. Hook it up, turn on the power to the board on and presto! As expected, we needed to re-tweak the offsets on the op-amps but having practiced the procedures and not having to locate malfunctions it went smoothly. We had the thing back in, the lab cleaned up (like any lab not involving germs or hazardous chemicals it had got a bit dirty,) and ready to try out the next day.

Wednesday: Tried to fire the beast up. The new board works perfectly, and even corrected some of the anomalous meter reading we were getting (like the fact that we were reading 0.3MV on the charge plates before we powered anything up.) We get a charge, the stabilizer works exactly the way its supposed to. We dump some hydrogen gas into the beam-line and crank the ionizer up and... nothing. No beam. The issue seems to be with the ionizer rather than the gas, but its hard to tell and we ran out of time before we could test further.

Thursday: Since the other ongoing project is the relocation of all the labs from the Physical Sciences building to the Biological Sciences building (which used to be the Physical Sciences building back in the old days apparently,) we're going through all the stuff in the lab and packing it for transport. I was looking through the stuff in one cabinet, trying to identify various materiel samples in jars and envelopes. Open the thing and look at the hand-written note inside, which read "The white stuff is calomel (Hg_2 Cl_2) and the red stuff is Hg_2 I_2." These chemicals were contained in a small glass tube which had broken and a quantity of the white stuff was now on my hand and clothing. So now I have a bunch of mercurous chloride on me. Thankfully it washes off and doesn't go into your skin, so it isn't a significant exposure, but ick!