In fact, recycling and scrounging are important traditions. I knew some of the stories at the link--that CMS, needing brass for the material of an endcap, recycled Russian artillery shells. When an experiment ends, parts of the apparatus and the electronics become available--and some people are quite creative in repurposing detectors for new experiments.
I had not heard this story before:
Kephart recalled Lederman acquiring a 16-inch battleship gun to filter out particles traveling at the wrong angles. One of Lederman’s grad students was just small enough to slip inside.
“I’ll never have a grad student of that caliber again,” Lederman would joke.
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Early in my pursuit of postgraduate study, I was in a meeting in a room on the top floor of the library that looked out over the roofs of some adjacent buildings on the hillside campus. My eye was drawn by some movement, and when looking closely I saw a bizarre contraption swinging a truss with a bunch of antennas in a sweep across the sky.
I asked my new companions "So what is that thing on the roof over there that looks like a Bofors Ack-Ack gun aiming a truss with 4 Yagi antennas at the sky?" Only to be told "Oh, that's a Bofors gun aiming a truss with 4 Yagi antennas at the sky."
"One of our grad students needed to get signals from satellites not in geostationary orbit, and thought that an AA gun would be easy to modify for the task, so he asked the Royal Navy if he could have one. They said yes, and had one spare from a Destroyer they were de-commissioning. The hand-built amplifiers to drive it are pretty interesting."
That's cool.
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