3D Printing
Have you embraced 3D printing for your lab? We are enamored with a printer that we purchased from Fusion. We print several items on it every week, and we have not had any major problems. Below are some pictures and schematics of various items we have designed and printed, all to facilitate research, make ourselves more organized, and/or repair or replace broken items. You are welcome to use and/or modify these files. Feel free to contact us with questions and/or show us pictures of your own items.
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NMR Mug This is one of my favorite designs. We have a 700 MHz NMR with a cryoprobe. However, it is located about a ten minute drive from our main chemistry labs. Students were driving samples back and forth, and they were worried about them breaking in the car, possibly spilling the world’s supply of a natural product all over their car. This solution fits into a cup holder in most cars. Note how the tubes drop down far enough that you cannot accidently break the top of the tube. It holds 9 NMR tubes and has slots for USB drives, to transfer your data. |
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‘Property of UNCG’ Tag We developed this simply for items that are shared around the teaching labs. They have a tendency to “walk away”, often by accident. |
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HPLC Sample Prep Station We developed this to hold items that were often scattered around our HPLC instruments. It holds syringes (3), extra needles, scintillation vials (4 large, 3 small), and Eppendorf tubes (2 large, 2 small) |
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6-Well Petri Dish Holder We developed this for holding small Petri dishes. This device holds them for scanning by droplet-probe mass spectrometry. |
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1-Well/Dual-Size Petri Dish Holder This block is also for holding Petri dishes. It is designed to hold two different size dishes. |
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Autosampler Tray Organizer This keeps the various plates and other materials that we use on our mass spectrometry platform organized. |
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Scanner Bed Alignment This aligns the Petri dish holders to the center of our scanner for heat mapping experiments. By doing so, scanned images of the Petri dishes are not distorted. |
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Wash Solvent Bottle Holder We needed a way to hold wash and solvent bottles. This was developed to attach to our LEAP system, keeping the bottles and tubing out of the way of the movable arm. |
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Solvent Drying Splitter We use air and nitrogen lines to dry down samples. Sometimes, we have large fractions (that would fit into milk bottle size containers). This device splits the air or nitrogen stream, such that it can be delivered to four bottles simultaneously. |
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Eppendorf Tray We are often working with Eppendorf tubes, and this tray simply keeps them organized for ease of pipetting. |
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Graduated Cylinder Repair We have several large graduate cylinders made out of glass. Invariably, these get chipped after repeated use. This was made to glue to the bottom of a cylinder, breathing new life into an otherwise ruined cylinder. |
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Pencil Tray The desk in my office is a bit of a mess. The students accuse me of walking off with their pens. They made this to simply make me a little more organized. |
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Tubing Clip This clip holds the tubing so that it is easier to fill up our sonicator with water. Otherwise, the tube had a tendency to flop out and spill water on the floor. |
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Test tube Rack We had a series of test tube racks that were getting old. It took us a while to figure out how to print new ones. We experimented with printing pieces and that would lock together like tabs. The latest design, however, makes an entire test tube rack as a single print job. |
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