You should be shown how to use anything that's new to you: there'll probably be SOPs in place. Otherwise ask to be trained on the machine - the university would rather have people being trained up on something than guessing, I think.
Must slightly disgree with Coastman, though! I don't think any funding body views a PhD as research training: they want publishable/patentable results and they want them NOW. Not how it should be, perhaps, but that seems to be how it is.