Glass Pipettes: A Perception of Size

[them0nk]

Just a heads up for people looking to use Glass Pipettes to measure out their DIY Liquids. I would have liked to know how big they are before buying them when i did...

They're Huge. They work great, but they're huge and cumbersome to use.

Here is a 2ml & 10ml Glass Pipette and 2ml (blue) & 25ml Wheel Pump... paired with a dollar bill, my Puresmoker Protege, and GG Slim.




Forum gods, I couldn't decide if i should have put this on the beginner's forum or here... it's more of a DIY thing though I thought.

 

[Scottes]

I concur. I think I measured the whole rig at 19 inches long.

I'm thinking of doing two things:
1. Cut about 4 or 5 inches off a pipette.
2. Use a bulb rather than a wheel pump.

My wife does stained glass and owns a diamond-blade band saw, so #1 is easy. #2 requires a $10 item and a $6 shipping charge. But doing both should turn that 19 inches into about 12 or 13.

 

[them0nk]

yeah i dont know how easy the bulbs are... if i could re-spend that money I'd get the .2-2ml pipettor with disposable tips. i bet you could even clean those tips if you wanted to. otherwise they're a mass produced item and are pretty cheap. i bet they have uber cool electronic ones that are from nill to 10ml or something that would be even better but i'm guessing those would be upwards of 300 dollars.

counting drops sucks though. and is completely inaccurate unless you use the exact same droppers, or find some that are "accurate to each other" or something.

 

[supertrkre2812]

The 10ml pipette is a baby compared to the 25ml pipette.
Why don't you use a 3ml syringe with a huge 16 gauge needle? Thats what I use to mix up my personal stash, plenty accurate enough for flavorings, measures down to 1/10ml.
If it's good enough to give you pain killers, it should be good enough to measure your vapin juice.
Supertrkre2812

 

[exogenesis]

Or you could do it by weight.
There are loads of types of 'mini-scale' out of china on ebay.

Recently got a 300g by 0.01g one for £10 free p+p (!),
really suprised how good the quality is (very good reproducability),
and how compact & light, fits in my coat inside pocket & has sturdy cover.
Delivery very quickly too - ridiculously so considering it was from China.

This is the one I got
0.01 - 300g Digital Electronic Balance Weight Scale on eBay (end time 26-Dec-09 09:31:52 GMT)
there are *many* others.

Fun pics: size comparison with other ways of measuring:
(click on the thumbnails below for more detailed pictures)


glass measuring cyclinders : 10, 25, 100 ml
plastic syringes : 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 30, 60, 150 ml
glass 10ml pipette (about the same length as the straight bore graduated ones)

with a 5ml juice bottle & with the 100ml cyclinder


Can use the same scale to making 5 ml juice, or maybe 200+ ml.

Still might need some syringes to pull the ingredients out of the bottles,
unless they're dropper bottles. But you don't have to try and guess the
volume by trying to read where the plunger-end is.

 

[Scottes]

Very interesting way to do it. And you can zero the scale at any point, too, so you don't have to add or subtract. Put bottle on, zero the scale, add drops of ingredient #1 until the weight is correct for that ingredient, zero the scale, add drops of ingredient #2 until the weight is correct for that ingredient, zero the scale...

 

[exogenesis]

Good point, should make it even easier to get the right amounts

 

[them0nk]

i can't imagine that the flavors, PG, and VG all weigh the same... between water and milk there is even a difference... i don't know how much but there is... to do accurate measurements doing so in volume is about the only sure fire way. i imagine that straight USP VG is heavier because of it's density.

i don't like syringes, used those at first because it was small and seemed as if it worked... I'm not well versed with syringes though i couldn't tell if there was a way to use them with a blunt tip correctly and if there was anything i could do about the bubble inside there. they're a pain to clean too... so disposable tips just sounds so interesting...

doing some preliminary tests to see what 1 ml or each way would help to do it with weight though... it would prove to make the weight method more complicated i would think...

maybe i over-stress the need to get really good measurements but then again i like to try to be consistent with recipes and such...

 

[Scottes]

If you develop a recipe by weight, and then increase the batch size by weight, it will all be the same.

If you took someone else recipe by volume, and tried the same proportions by weight, you'd probably have to adjust a little.

But almost all ingredients are PG-based, so the differences would be very small, probably no noticeable. So all you'd have to worry about is the near-tasteless VG, which is noticeably heavier than PG.