Question: What's the most complicated piece of equipment you've ever used (it doesn't have to be science equipment) ?

Matt Bawn answered on 5 Mar 2018:

For my PhD I studied an obscure form of spectroscopy called EPR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_paramagnetic_resonance. In my first year in order to teach myself how to run experiments I assembled a working spectrometer out of bits we had from two old spectrometers in the lab. It took weeks, and I had to read about microwave engineering. High voltage power supplies, electromagnets and even water coolers. In the end I finally got it working and ran my first experiment but then realised the computer that ran it was so old that I couldn’t transfer the data and so then I had to write a new operating system for it to bring it up to date. I found this whole process to be complicated but found that setting goals and taking things one step at a time while trying to understand what I was trying to do really helped me. The experience I gained through this enabled me to go on and use scarier and more complex spectrometers (If you make a mistake you can break it and it will be out of action for 6 months if you can afford the £100000 repair bill).