Ridin' dirty

Now, witness the waterpower of this fully plumbed and operational polishing station. All right, all right, so maybe it's actually much closer to White and Nerdy. But, Sterling and I did get our hands very dirty getting this set up. Part one of Operation: Histology Lab was plumbing in a sink and Buehler Ecomet 3 Grinder/Polisher. The sink came from surplus, the grinder from my genius lab equipment supplier. Even though this room used to be a bathroom, there was no drain easily accessible. Fortunately, the sink in the prep lab is adjacent to the doorway to this space, and the hot water heater and plumbing are mounted inside this room. So, it was relatively straightforward to tie into both by punching a small hole in the wall and linking to the drainpipe for the prep lab sink. This also allowed us to clean 20 or 30 years worth of crap that had fallen behind the sink, including several complete stacks of paper towels that made for some awesome ant-farm-like rodent nests.

Yeah, this is more like what the mess in that closet looked like when we started, but this is after I already removed the flammable cabinet, a big bookshelf full of junk n' stuff, another smaller bookshelf full of the same, and another of the 48"w metal cabinets. Did I mention this room is 8'x13'?

Sterling cleans up the nastiness that remained after he cut out the back panel of the sink in the prep lab.

We took turns chiseling a hole through the wall for the drain to pass through, and I removed those faucets and tied into the hot and cold water to supply the sink and Ecomet.

Above the blue tape is where I cut the existing sink drain and tied in the new drain from the left, with the tee.

Trimming the existing drain pipe.

The Ecomet is plumbed on the supply side from the former eyewash mount with a ball valve here. There is also a valve under the sink, where we transition from the half inch pipe to 3/8 copper flex line and a compression fitting. I could probably do away with all of this for a cleaner behind the wall solution, but this looks kinda cool. Some day I'll make up my mind. On the return, the Ecomet bowl drains through a 1" ID vinyl hose into a tee I installed just above the P-trap under the histo lab sink. A pretty elegant solution, if I do say so myself.

Now I have to pee.