DIY Lab Equipment

Happy new year!

So, when your lab can't afford fancy equipment and columns with unbroken taps are a luxury, one must hoard hoard hoard, and failing that, one must improvise.

I've become particularly fond of a short, fat column, but as my Master's supervisor says, long and thin is better than short and fat and after using it several times, I've grown a little tired of having to refill the solvent every four fractions. Since we don't seem to have any reservoirs here in the projects, I decided to make my own...

A dropping funnel on top of the column as a reservoir...pretty neat! This worked like a charm, and was one of the fastest columns that I've run so far, with my compound coming off on the 3rd fraction! Of course we ran out of dry ice so I haven't been able to vac off the solvent any quicker than ghetto style, i.e. open air, which sucks as it's screwing up with my projected schedules grrr.

Some other creative DIY lab equipment techniques I picked up from back in the day include:

* Stacking glass pipettes into each other to make a glass rod for stirring those long pesky measuring cylinders
* Using Gilson pipette tips as TLC spotters, some of the Masters students here make theirs from snapping off the tips of syringe needles
* Connecting an inverted syringe needle to an air tap via tubing and paraffin tape in order to dry NMR tubes
* Sticking a syring needle into a rubber subaseal and using it to connect a vial to the rotor vap in order to vac off small amounts of solvent (risky as the vials aren't made to withstand vacuums!)

And who says that chemists aren't creative! Let me know if you have any other pieces of DIY wisdom to share!