Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Print Your Own Labware, Catalysts Included

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It is an interesting economic problem as it costs way more than glass, but is "optimized". Not sure when it would economically pay off.

Recently I was making fun of chemistry glass taper standards on/., because just like in CS / IT there are so many conflicting standards that won't interoperate. Its almost as bad as screw threads. Printing a "optimized" 127 ml beaker with built in electrodes instead of taking a generic pyrex 125 ml off the shelf and sticking some off the shelf electrodes into it, seems a complete waste of expensive and slow 3-d printing resources, but writing a "magic" python script (or whatever) that could squirt out a 3-d file to adapt any ground glass taper to any other ground glass taper would be pretty handy.

Aren't the clamps for ground glass called "keck clips" or something like that? I'm talking about the little plastic clamps that hold ground glass joints together so they don't fall apart while working. I believe that product came out in the mid 80s a bit too late for my lab time in the early 90s. A fellow o-chem student had a nice small lab fire due to the lab not having those new-fangled keck clips available (no injury or property damage, thankfully). I think there is a realistic safety advantage by being able to print up the exact safety gear you need, whenever you need it. That might be another valid chem lab market. Not having the proper clamps and such is no excuse if you can just print another.

I also think it would be fun to 3-d print microscale apparatus, because at least its small and cheap and fast. Didn't read the article, maybe thats the scale they're talking about.

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