Cleaning and handling small, circular coverslips

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Beatsy
Posts: 2105
Joined: Fri Jul 05, 2013 3:10 am
Location: Malvern, UK

Cleaning and handling small, circular coverslips

Post by Beatsy »

I posted about this on the Facebook 'Amateur Microscopy' group, but thought some here might find it useful too...

It drives me nuts when small, circular coverslips stick together during batch cleaning and I have to separate them, potentially recontaminating clean surfaces. They're hard to see when submerged and really fiddly to catch hold of. Bad enough with simple clean slips stored in alcohol, but far worse in the context of scary cleaning protocols such as piranha mix (boiling peroxide and sulphuric acid). Obviously this is no big deal if you're cleaning slips for casual use where a final wipe with a lint free cloth is acceptable. But if you want pristine, chemically clean/etched surfaces (as I prefer when prepping cover slips for diatom arrangements) it's a nuisance and drastically slows the handling process.

I researched coverslip racks as a potential fix, but the ones I found were all "mini toast rack" designs that don't really hold the slips in place; they'd easily fall out in boiling solutions. The toast-rack struts touch the slip faces too, yet another potential problem. And the racks are huge compared to the coverslips which means bigger glassware and more chemicals are needed. Not good. Even if these racks *were* suitable, I still wouldn't buy them on principle, because they're so piss-takingly expensive for what they are! What to do?

Well, yesterday I had a brainwave. The pic shows my prototype solution, based on polypropylene vial stoppers (all I had to hand at the time). I cut the top of the cap off leaving a short tube (inside diameter ~2mm less than these 13mm coverslips). Pinch the tube slightly flat, push in a cover slip and release. Several slips, each held by two edges in their own small tube, can be thrown into boiling solutions, rinsed, put through ultrasonic cleaning and generally handled with no danger of sticking together or being contaminated by accidental contact with the surface.

These are only working prototypes. I've ordered PTFE tubing of various sizes and wall thickness to get much better resistance to hot acids and test some refinements, but these already work perfectly for most other solvents and processes I subject my cover slips to. I have small design tweaks in mind, and it should be able to handle all coverslip shapes. I'll update the group after the tubing arrives.

I've never seen this done before, but I'm a persistent re-inventor so I doubt it's an original idea. But on the slim chance it is - you heard it here second... :)

Image

Ichthyophthirius
Posts: 1152
Joined: Thu Mar 07, 2013 5:24 am

Post by Ichthyophthirius »

Phantastic! Thanks for sharing.

I'm using the coverslip racks for 22 mm coverslips but if I ever had to boil (or stain) such small coverslips this would work.

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