Someone else snatched away the TEM at the last minute, and I am profoundly grateful. We did some research (after I bid, not before, due to my trigger-happy personality). It turns out that unlike scanning EM's, sample preparation on Transmission EM's is a bitch. You have to make 50-nanometer slices of your sample with a microtomer, and make really thin plastic support membranes and all sorts of other crap. Check out Sec-II.A.1 and Sec-II.A.2 of these online lecture notes about TEM's.

Plus I got an email back from the people holding the auction who informed me that, disassembled, it took up an entire room. It would have been a great deal of trouble to assemble and even more to use. Although I would have had outs - a friend suggested donating it to an educational institution at a depreciated value well above its cost for a tax write-off, and I got an email after the auction from someone who thought I'd won it and wanted it for their school, but hadn't gotten the go-ahead from their department in time.

During the course of telling everyone about this, it turns out that a friend (Jessica) works with a guy whose previous career was as (I kid you not) a used Scanning Electron Microscope salesman. So we are investigating the possibility of getting a used SEM. I hear new desktop models are down to a few grand nowadays.

I'm off to San Mateo to help a friend who's trying to get a poker game started there.

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