As I previously had stated in another article I would start to let you know how to build or fabricate much of your own equipment. Quality equipment for a laboratory can be extremely costly and any time that you can construct your own you are likely to save a considerable amount of hard earned dollars.
In just about every bit of work that you will be doing in cloning plants involves measurements of some sort. It could be measures for bleach or for liquid dish detergent but the measurements should end up being accurate and honest. As such we will begin our lab supplies by creating some simple measuring devices.
Usually there will be no special equipment required in order to learn about cloning plants or micropropagation of plant tissue. A quick glance at your kitchen is likely to reveal a considerable amount of capabilities for your new hobby lab. Before you seriously begin any laboratory work what so ever you should learn how to make a few very useful items from your kitchen such as creating empty dispenses into storage bottles for your various ingredients that are usually needed in your cloning projects. Make sure that these bottles are always properly labeled and out of reach of small children. These various bottles can range from empty salad dressing jars to ketchup containers.
Being able to accurately perform measurement conversions is important. The following points may help you in this respect after all with a home lab you may not have access to graduates or pipets of any sort in order to measure volumes. Usually the metric system of measurement is employed in any sort of laboratory work so we will naturally follow suit and use the same thing here. I have included a list of approximations that you may wish to hang near your work area.
A set of kitchen measuring spoons can provide you with a vast number of measurements suitable for laboratory work. You can use a straight edge of your knife to slide off the excess material so that you end up with an exactly level spoonful.
* 1/4 teaspoon is equal to 1.10 grams (Packed)
* 1 teaspoon is equal to 4.35 grams (Packed)
* 1 teaspoon is equal to 4.25 grams (unpacked)
* 1 tablespoon is 13.0 grams (Packed)
* 1 tablespoon is 12.6 grams (Unpacked)
To create some quick and simple volumetric tools you should take two 500 ml soda bottles. Now fill the first one up to the neck with water. Pour the water into a second identical bottle until you show both at the same level. Mark both bottles at that point as 250 ml. Discard the water within one of the bottles and repeat the procedure again. This time mark the bottles as 125 ml on each bottle.
You can take a 1 liter soda bottle and using the kitchen measuring cup filled to 100 ml of water proceed to pour this water into the one liter bottle and mark it as 100 ml. Add another 100 ml and mark it as 200 ml. You can continue in this manner until you have completely filled the one liter bottle with water. You can perform a similar procedure on just about any bottle and mark them with 5, 10, 15, 20 and 30 ml.
As you can readily see you don’t need to spend a lot of money on equipment when you can use your imagination and come up with products around the home to use. Our next article will expand upon this idea a bit more
Copyright @ 2009 Joseph Parish
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