Maintenance must have been a delight. I can only guess they crammed so much in to get accuracy in a very small central processing area to deal with the tiny sections of blood. It's quite spectacular. I wonder how many tests it performed in its time. And how many times it dispensed bad news.
Really educational tear down! I've loved seeing the insides of such a complex expensive piece of kit. Thanks for doing this teardown! I do worry about part 3 though - "Mike contracts a rare blood disease from the blood machine!"
Absolutely fascinating Mike! Most of us wouldn't event know that equipment like this even exists, so thankyou for sharing this awesome tear-down. It's also suprising how poorly maintained such an expensive piece of equipment was, it looks like it has had many leaks over the years
That has got to be the most impressive bit's of equipment I've seen. Those ceramic blocks reminded me of the valve in a monoblock tap, same sort of ceramic discs sliding across one another. Loved the crazy machine at the end.
I know a guy that used to work for a major darts manufacturer. He made some amazing prototypes. He made a dartboard tester with pneumatics rather than steppers/hydraulics, as it will give if it has a bang up on the wire. The machine has mashed up many dart boards. Many Many Many dart boards and still lives. All off a old school dip pic to.
Cool application for the 71 valves: line them all up and have them squirt water downwards. Hook them up to an mcu, time it all correctly and make them produce text/images with falling jets of water. :D
In Busan, South Korea there is a Lotte department store with a fountain in the middle of a 4 story indoor courtyard. On the bottom are normal fountain things that spray up, and on the top there is a ring of a good 100 or more valves that spray down, doing exactly what you suggest; writing, patterns, images, etc. The effect looks cool but sadly they start dissolving in the air a bit more quickly than would be nice, so it smears out by about halfway down. It's still impressive though!
If you could make it work behind a glass panel in some kind of vacuum chamber, or some other kind of controlled environment to keep the droplets contained better, it could look pretty awesome
Daniel G They should do what they do in 'Vegas and remove all the air bubbles to make the water clearer, maybe that would help "stick" the water together?
sashablfc yeah some kind of good nozzle design would be important. I think it would be expecting a lot to expect the water to stay together all the way down four stories in the open in the middle of a building!
I was taught a little pneumatics while getting my electrician's licence, you and I and everyone else who gets their hands on that kind of hardware always make the same first project >_
Each time you said "swing out section", you kept reminding me of the 80s band "Swing out Sister"... which led me to their music videos ^_^ Brilliant video Mr Mike, thank you so much & God bless you :)
I work for a low volume high price medical manufacturer and you would probably find that all the looms are made by a loom contractor rather than having their own employees make up looms in the factory. Also the green LED to measure heamoglobin makes sense as green light wavelengths are highly absorbed by Heamoglobin so the more Heamoglobin in the blood the less green light that would get through to the photodetector.
Wow, what a fascinating tear down!! I used to work at a hospital (non-medical work) and saw what may have been older versions of the same machinery in action but from a distance; so they really are some of the more interesting machines to see torn down. Ancient high speed xerox machines are also quite good... ultra rare tho I really like the pneumatic build at the end there... maybe make a piston lift - ratchet to lift a big weight and another piston to release it to hammer something...
I laughed out loud when I saw the pneumatic feedback loop you made!! This was electro/opto/vacuum/pron at its best. Great video. My suggestion for the actuators and valves is to simply send it straight to ebay.
Christ on a bike Mike, THIS STUFF IS EVEN BETTER THAN PORN !! Thankyou so much for sharing it with us. It really is an incredible and beautiful piece of engineering - there are obviously some "bloody" clever people at Horiba (sorry). I've worked on some very high capital systems (ion implant) and I'm surprised it didn't cost more than the 250k you mention. I don't think I'd like to do a major service on it though... Great stuff Sir!! Thanks again. Really. ...
These precisely surfaced ceramics disk you show at 30:00 looks somewhat like the disks you can find in a ceramic disk faucet cardridge. (taking one apart is a thing to do at least one time, you use it everyday and you don't know how it's made inside ?)
Amazing teardown! You could make a display with all the pumps and valves with some piping arranged in columns (maybe zig-zagging up and down a few times to get several columns worth from each one. Use valves/pumps to suck up air /dyed liquid in the correct pattern then pump it along till the 'image' appears.. Would look really cool when changing image with everything being sucked along.
I imagine the machine has gone through a thorough cleaning and decontamination process when it was decommissioned from service. HIV infection is 0.3% chance of seroconverting with a hollow needle stick, and practically 0 from intact skin. The time the machine has sat around as well probably means that any remaining infective agents that remained after cleaning have become inert.
Thanks for the tear down Mike, I enjoy your videos are find them fascinating. I really appreciate the time you take to go into detail about the individual parts, it's really interesting to see inside such a complicated machine that I would never be able to myself. Just one small thing for future videos, it would be really good if you could get a big powerful light source to help illuminate the equipment, in some wide shots it's a little bit dark and the low contrast makes it hard to see things.
At 23:25 it looks like you have a crystal gicleur. A gicleur is a flow restriction device, this one is probably made of crystal so that it is extremely resistant to mineral deposits that could otherwise block the flow completely
Hey Mike, If your camera has the option to record in 50 or 60 fps, please upload in those frame rates. There's too much motion blur when panning at 24fps.
One of your best teardowns, Mike, Great cinematography (especially macro-photography). Good editing and "plotting": there is lot of time involved in the actual manual teardown and vidographing, and then figuring out which footage to keep or cut out. All hard, laborious work ... and it's APPRECIATED! About that complex device... Much of the high cost of healthcare -- at least in the US -- goes to pocket the CEOs of medical-technology corps and big pharma. The engineering complexity can be intimidating -- read: "only high-end companies can put it off." Maybe some of that complexity is unnecessary. How much can be done on micro-array or other biochip? And how much of the blood analysis can NOW be done on a smartphone-based device? I Googled "smartphone blood analyzer" and found some interesting stuff.
Cool teardown. I bet the laser was stuffed, and needed regassing, never mind This bit of kit was probably running 24/7. It looks like it leaked reagents all the time as there is corrosion every where. Pity the poor service engineer who had to find the leak in this thing. Perhaps that why it went out of service? Leaky reagent crap everywhere. Small foot print is a selling point for a lot of lab instruments, as lab space is expensive to build and often limited in size. A Hospital pathological lab would probably have several of these systems, in case of breakdown ect. Just think this analyser is doing what a team of skilled technician would have done ten years ago. Hospitals have tons of cash for this type of thing. I would guess they have a well funded replacement program for this type of essential kit. Stepper motor and ball screws bonanza time on Mikes ebay!
I'm a bit concerned about the lack of gloves considering that this machine has seen the blood of a substantial amount of people. It's probably been flushed out, but the dried up pool of blood at 6:50 would have made me a bit uncomfortable. Then again, I'm not an engineer, so dismantling this kind of equipment with gloves might just be impractical.
If the valves make any noise you could make a valve band and have them play some tunes. The pneumatics are just asking to be made into a robot of some kind. Make a tea machine or something.
Curious to know why you buy stuff like this? Is it out of pure interest or because you have plans to use bits of the machine then get a bit of money back from the scrap? Or all the above? Whatever the answer we all like your tear downs.
Gillian Seed Dear Mr. Arrogance, Steve pretty much had answered his own question. Yes, It's all of the above - curiosity, plans to use parts, sell some components online, make an interesting YT video :)
That collection of parts looks like something Tim Hunkin and Rex Garrod would have used to make a walking robot or whatever. It definitely has the potential to make a fund raiser gimmick for the local good cause.
Just found your channel and loving every video - but the end of this had me laughing hard!! thanks Mike! Did you make anything else with the pneumatics?
How on earth did anyone service these things? There couldn't have been more than a dozen people who knew the entire system well enough to really dig into a misbehaving and know what to replace and how
I'd make a robotic arm out of all those pneumatic actuators. As for the valves at first I though an automatic watering device for seedlings but no there could still be contamination.
where does all the cleaning/flushing liquid end up? is this machine supposed to be connected to the building drain? also it would be nice to know how much time it takes to assemble one of these puppies.
Nah, nothing was dumped into biological waste, it was just cycled with solutions that completely inhibit biological growth and kill already existing life(blood, diseases, etc). The entire thing is biologically safe, but that test head and blood residue made me jump a bit.
***** To decontaminate you have a few options, Heat like an autoclave and antiseptic solution like 70% alcohol, or formaldehyde (carcinogen), ethylene oxide gas (your would wish you drank the formaldehyde) or smiler or perhaps gamma irradiation via C60 source (fried electronics). Problem is that's a delicate bit of kit so if anything I expect the most would be to run a fluid of some sort thru it. As seen in the video there was plenty of gunk around the sampling processing units and perhaps in the lines and cuts on Dave's hands. :-(
Systemrat2008 His name is Michael, by the way. No, there are %very expensive% liquids that are specifically designed for these machines to kill everything and bring EXTERMINATION to diseases and bacteria. You just fill the sample cassette with a specific pattern of things(EXTERMINATUS liquid, then probably residue remover, then distilled water), and they get "sampled" the same way an array of blood samples would.
***** Great. I still have memory's of a low water use dialysis machines which was use by both military (desert storm) and civilians and it had lots of silicon hose and when you removed the clamps there was inevitably some dried blood slightly under the clamp area. For that reason hospitals had hot machines used on aids and hep B & C patients. I am super paranoid and used lots of protection. Perhaps the risk was very minor but not zero.
***** My guess would be the machine does that internally with hopper feed bulk cleaning chemicals (since it is used between every sample) -- the same reason as why the sampling head moves, not the tray -- because then the sampling head can retract and 'sample' some delicious kill-fluid :)
I'm pretty sure machines like this have a cleaning program/cycle which enables the operator to run cleaning agent through all of the tubes. I'm more concerned about the "drip trays" inside the machine. It's like an ink jet-printer with a biohazard.
