An offer to everyone here

[okterok]

I recently made this offer to one LJ friend but I feel I should extend this offer to the general world at large

Comments

[randomdreams]

GC's are hella expensive to run, as well as to acquire. You can do a surprising amount of diagnostics with paper chromatography if you choose interesting solvents. Even good uncoated typing paper will give fairly good results. Cut open a black sharpie and rinse the fiber element with some fairly pure ethanol -- everclear would work great -- and you can get a whole range of bands on typing paper, and a different range with water, and a different yet with acetone. Differential paper chromatography isn't as sexy as GC/mass spectrometry but it's pretty easy to do at home and a good science thing for kids.
So's making a spectrometer using a DVD as a diffraction grating. I've seen people make stuff that involves a digital camera, so you mix a known sample with your unknown, and then you take a picture of the absorption/transmission spectrum and using the peaks from the known substance you can process the unknown using, say, Imagemagick, and have a computerized lookup process, like this. I haven't built the whole thing yet, but it's on

[okterok]

wow! well that's pretty sweet for sure. I had no idea you could do that much at home.

And yes, I do realize that GC/MS are silly expensive in all aspects, hence my "if someday my dreams are realized" caveat ;)