Stern-Gerlach sort of lives

I have been quite busy trying to get the Stern-Gerlach experiment to work. After fixing the leaky flange I tried to run the experiment. Yesterday I saw the first signs of a beam of potassium atoms. It wasn't really a beam, more of a diffuse flow from the oven to the detector, but I guess that once you measure some potassium atoms it is a matter of time until you get the thing working.

I think that the reason I didn't see a clear beam was because I didn't put the detector together properly. The detector consists of a hot tungsten wire and a collector plate. The plate has a hole in it to let the beam of potassium atoms through. They should then hit the hot wire where they lose their outer electron. The remaining potassium ions are then attracted to the plate, which is at a potential of -9V compared to the wire.



The problem is that when I took another look at the detector the wire wasn't directly beneath the hole in the plate, but had slipped to the side. This means that atoms from the beam could not be detected, only those which had somehow reflected off a wall somewhere.