JEOL JXA-8600 Microprobe

A friend is getting rid of a JEOL JXA-8600 Microprobe, which is basically a SEM with a bunch of WDX units on it. So here is the deal. No clue if it works. post

Motors for the WDX are missing as well as the control console for the WDX. It appears to have everything else including the vacuum pump / air compressor section.

It “should” work fine as a regular SEM. We have never even hooked power to it after it arrived and now we need to make room for another SEM coming in.

To make it work you will need 240v single phase as well as a cold water supply, I would recommend a chiller so you dont waste water.

It is HEAVY, you will probably need to rent a forklift to move it.

This notice for a free scanning electron microscope (SEM) came over one of the hacker lists I read. My first thought is, what's a WDX?

Wavelength dispersive x-ray (WDX) spectrometer.

The manufacturer says, the JXA-8230, the fifth generation of SuperProbes, is a high resolution, highly stable SEM and a WD/ED Combined Electron Probe Microanalyzer (EPMA) with a new PC-based operating environment for easy data acquisition and analysis. site

But what would one do with this thing if you didn't have a pc? That's the question that interests me.

I'm told that pound for pound scrap metal is more valuable that used pc computers. With that in mind, imagine how this exquisite device is so dependent on obsolete software for junk computers.

Imagine if instead of using a brittle monolithic application program the scientific community ran their microanalyzers with a collection of plugins, each programmed in analyzer subsystem specific markup, and each analyzer setup freely distributed among analyzer operators. With this and a forklift one could put this thing to work again.

Aside: Andrew Dawes replied that he might find a home for it on campus. site