Scrounging for Fun and Profit

Guinnessy writes: "According to Toni Feder on Physics Today, scrounging used equipment is worthwhile if you can avoid the pitfalls of wasting time and compromising scientific goals. Feder interviews experimenters who have dug up everything from dewars to nuclear reactors."

Comments

God Yes!

[rgmoore]

Scrounging and scavenging equipment is a vital skill for all experimental scientists. It's usually more along the lines of finding the unused goodies that somebody has stashed in the back of their lab than finding the expensive stuff described in the article, but everyone without military-class bugets learns to do it. (Actually, I'll bet that even the best funded darlings do a lot of scrounging, too) Figuring out how to use the components is sometimes a bit of a trick, but there are few things as fun as finding a pile of junk and figuring out how how those components are going to help your next project.

Scrounge -- New Tangent

[behindthewall]

An important thing about scrounge is that it can push someone off into a direction they might not otherwise have taken, or even considered.

How often has a chance encounter or off-topic exploration resulted in a true find. That dohickey may lead you to something great.