Introduction

The design and construction of scientific apparatus is often accompanied by serious pitfalls. These can be a cause of much wasted time, and a source of frustration to those who are not familiar with the problems. This chapter examines a few of most common difficulties, and some useful general strategies for easing the development of reliable apparatus. Detailed design and construction considerations are discussed elsewhere in the book, and in the references at the end of the chapter.

Commercial vs. self-made items

One should generally not make equipment and parts that can be obtained commercially. An important reason for this is that it very often takes much longer to design and construct such items in a research laboratory than is originally envisaged (see Section 5.3). Most of the things that are done in a laboratory are not new. Hence, much time and effort can be saved by making full use of the multitude of products that are available on the market, and easily located on the Web.

Many commercial devices of a given type may be made by a company, and several generations may be designed and manufactured over the years. For this reason, the people who design these devices (often professional engineers) frequently have considerable experience in dealing with their potential problems. Furthermore, since large development costs can be spread out over many units, the reliability, ease-of-use, and performance of these can be much higher, given the cost, than those of equivalent devices designed and built in-house.