Designing, Building And Using a Home Laboratory

Designing, Building and Using a Home Laboratory By: John Farrell Kuhns Part 1: Introduction (Revised 30 March 2011)
In today’s world with its terrorism, seemingly rampant drug use and other scary goings on it is certainly not unusual for the idea of building and using a home laboratory to be looked upon, by some, as an activity that must be very suspicious. There will be a never-ending stream ofunwarranted remarks from friends and neighbors if you tell them you have a home laboratory. Usually, you’ll hear some smart-alecky person ask, “So, you makin’ meth?” On the other hand, if you tell someone that you have a workshop in your home, they’ll either be very interested and want to talk about their own workshop and what projects you’re working on, or they’ll be so intimidated by yourpresumed skills that they’ll quickly change the subject. A workshop is a laboratory; a laboratory is a workshop. My personal travel into life with a home laboratory started when I was 12. Many of my customers at our science store in Parkville know my story well. I received an aquarium and a chemistry set for Christmas. As I like say, aquariums and chemistry have been inextricably linked, in my life,ever since. That link started in 1959 for me; I’d would have liked it to have started earlier, and I now tell our customers that 9 years old for a child, girl or boy, is the nearly perfect age to build and start using a home science laboratory. My father was a cabinet maker, and I never wanted for really nice work spaces with custom built desks and shelving. My first serious laboratory was in ourhome on Russell Road in Kansas City, It was in the basement, against a wall. My dad’s cabinet workshop was on the other side of the basement. If I needed a test tube rack I simply crossed over to his side of the basement and working with a band saw, drill press, glue, clamps and table sander built what I needed. Even though my dad took little interest in what I did in my lab, he was always concernedabout my safety, and was ready to assist me when his particular skills were needed. In our science store we see families with interests in science, and we definitely see families in which the parents want to support their children’s interest in science. We don’t always recommend a home laboratory, but we are quick to recognize an ongoing theme when a family as made a few visits. In those cases wewill often recommend a home laboratory as a way for the family to have a shared interest and as a way for the young scientists to understand that they can do real science at home. Of course, we often see baby boomers like my wife and me, who either once had a chemistry set, or a modest home lab, but long since had “out grown” these earlier interests. Many say, “Wow, I wish there had been a storelike yours when I was growing up.” I think there are very few endeavors in life more interesting and exciting than science…any science. I became a scientist, a chemist, because of my early interest and encouragement. Today I am a chemist as well as an ichthyologist, and my family opened our science store just so there is not another generation that will grow up in Kansas City someday wishing therehad been a store like H.M.S. Beagle when they were growing up. A year or two before we opened the H.M.S. Beagle in Parkville I had designed and built chemistry sets that were housed in large, hardwood cases complete with brass hardware and secret compartments. No two sets were alike; the first one was built as a Christmas gift for a nephew in Hickory, North Carolina. It weighted in at 80 poundsand came complete with over 85 different chemicals. It also had a CD-ROM of the 1936

edition of the A.C. Gilbert Chemistry for Boys which accompanied their largest and most complete chemistry sets at the time. That manual is still to be found, in Adobe Acrobat PDF format, on a CD-ROM in the chemistry sets we sell at the Beagle (and, we often have actual, intact copies for sale at the Beagle)....