Oh boy! Bearings
and busted gears!
![Frown :( :(](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
Not unknown in this forum, but you will certainly have the sympathies of most folk here.
I still envy that your lathe is at least somewhat together. I had one lathe in pieces, and the other working OK until it too went into a mess. I won't be putting back the underneath drive in the way the previous owner bodge had it. Also, the whole angle-iron-based frame, with drawers is not really what I want to retain. When I say "angle iron", you would expect the sort a tad thicker than 5/32". In other places, it uses that 1/16" shelving stuff with perforations slots. If I can't weld up something somewhat improved, then even a stout wooden bench would work better. When I gave it a firm shove, I could see the movement relative to the wall! It now is to be re-located into my outhouse shop anyway, so I now want a better bench or stand under it.
Relentlessly, I keep having a stacked-up list of stuff I have to trawl through before I can get to play. My new-old-stock ex cold war surplus Geiger tube arrived from Ukraine on Friday, and all I can do with it is stash it for now.
The last thing I needed was was a yell for help from my wife at the end of the drive, arriving back from a shopping trip. "We have a problem with the car"! No power steering, and big red "battery" symbol on the dash had to mean the alternator drive belt, which also turns the hydraulics pump, was kaput. It's is a old(ish) C-Class Mercedes Estate. It must have been a tough work-out for her trying to get it home. The belt was OK, but the tensioner roller, and it's bearing, and retainer cap were a tipped over wreck. I opted to have my favourite non-dealership Merc car service guy bring his recovery truck with the clever ramp thing that just loads the car on. I could have have set about fixing that sort of stuff myself. I have been fixing car engines since I was about 10, but this time, I let someone else do it - and he had the parts in stock!
I am going up the learning curve with KiCad. It's open source Schematic + PCB, but now so capable that in industry, it is becoming preferred to stuff like Altium.
I actually think that our XRF front-end is the one part where we do know what to do. If it is going to work at all, then these bits must obey the physics. There is not much we can do to make those atoms respond any better than the way they would always have done. Agreed, we can get cute with the geometry, in trying to arrange that any responses towards the diode don't have much place left to escape.
For any in the future who would like to try some of this, we, and they, have ever fewer ways of getting hold of anything that reasonably be used to irradiate the sample. About all that is left is smoke detectors. Am241 can only be man-made, a by-product of stuff going on in nuclear power stations, and even these type of detectors are being "phased out" where possible. There is no serious health risk, but they may nevertheless be retired from use as a prudent avoidance measure. I am considering using up the thorium gas mantles I have, packed into a circular trough, held in with epoxy. A chemistry adventure with TIG rods and peroxide may also happen.