Tinker, tailor, soldier, scientist…

Service engineers may well wince, but when it comes to equipment, it's high time scientists remembered they are natural tinkerers says Matthew Partridge

Research tends to breed people who are very subject-focused. The nature of the job tends to push people into narrowing their expertise down to a finely focused point.

This is in some ways unavoidable and, often, required to push the boundaries of your chosen researcher area. However, I feel like this can lead some aspiring proto-researchers to believe that honing your academic point is the way to succeed in research. A consequence of which is they sometimes want to avoid learning new skills they feel don’t fit the narrow range of knowledge they are aiming to collect. Which causes people to miss out one of the best skills that all researchers should learn – tinkering.

Tinkering is the time honoured skill of either fixing, breaking or modifying things – often with no idea what you are doing

Tinkering is the time honoured skill of either fixing, breaking or modifying things – often with no idea what you are doing. Equipment breaks, and call out fees for service engineers can be astronomical. A word I use in order to compare their fees to the price of literally becoming an astronaut and flying into space where you can get a wide enough view of the massive invoice they will have written.

It isn’t always possible, but sometimes opening it up and having a think through the problem might be a simpler way of solving it. I bought a humidity generator a while back that was (for want of a better word) ‘coughing’. Turns out that inside they’d managed to kink a tube, thus reducing the flow. It took about 30 seconds to tinker with, and I got it working again.

But why stop there? Tinkering with things doesn’t just cover broken equipment – you can also adapt equipment to better fit your purpose. I recently purchased a new laser which was not quite the right height. We unscrewed various parts and lowered it to within 0.5mm of where we needed it, but were limited because they’d built the base with big screws. So we bought new low-profile screw heads and now it sits exactly in the right place. Again quick solution that just required looking it and thinking “how can I fix this” and not “OMG screws, those are for screw technicians to deal with!”

So for any aspiring scientists and researchers reading this – mess with stuff

And you can even go so far as tinkering with new equipment. I know of a group in Southampton who wanted temperature and humidity monitoring of their labs, so they built themselves little Raspberry Pi connected sensors from off the shelf parts. They didn’t invent new science they just found a way of tinkering some existing kit into something they could use. So for any aspiring scientists and researchers reading this – mess with stuff. If something’s broken or something’s not quite fit for purpose, don’t be afraid to open it up and have a look at it. Most of the time you’ll take one look and think “Yup, just as expected, it’s got wires in it...” and promptly call the service engineer.

But every now and again you’ll open something up and fix it yourself, and in doing so learn a little more about the system.

Dr Matthew Partridge