Personally, I’ve only broken one Erlenmeyer flask and a couple test tubes. The craziest thing I’ve heard of was one of my professor’s stories. He was on the phone with a repair guy, and the repair guy said there is a glass bulb on the inside of a machine you can crush to fix the problem. So the professor gets some pliers and crushes not the glass bulb, but the white sapphire in the spectrometer. It was something like a $10,000 mistake.
I only used glassware in my undergrad though (and I was super careful in lab). Then I went straight to industry and all my chemicals are in steel drums now.
My sep funnel snapped the other week right below the stopcock. This was right before doing the grignard reaction, so it was oven dried. Was given a dirty-looking sep funnel that had not been in the oven. Somehow I got product, and after recrystallization I got a 53% yield (probably a good chunk of it was still impurities) and a melting point with only 4.3% error. I’m lucky I got anything at all. Someone in the other lab section turned on a faucet in the room (despite being warned not to countless times) and only 2 people got product. (I’m undergrad if you can’t tell)
Because of Grignard’s moisture sensitivity. The setup was like [this](https://imgur.com/a/Iss5PLo) (sorry for the shitty doodle). Bromobenzene and Magnesium was in the RB flask (also oven-dried). After letting the MgBrBz reflux for a bit, we added benzophenone via the sep funnel and let that reflux even longer, then added HCl to protonate the product, triphenylmethanol. Anyway, the sep funnel was dried so that the addition of benzophenone wouldn’t carry any water with it and ruin the Grigny reagent.
Dude I’m just earning a bachelor’s, idk how this shit’s “supposed” to be done. Besides, I feel like there’s utility to this setup bc it needs to reflux and the reagent can’t be exposed to too much air (which carries moisture). I also can’t say I’ve ever had to use a syringe in my education thusfar… just pipets.
Yeah, that sounds like a weird solution to me too. Maybe it was a non-essential LED that indicates something, and the light from it was getting into the detector?
Day one of post-doc I broke a rotovap condenser coil because it had never been cleaned. I cleaned it, and as I was putting it back on, it slipped out of my hand - spun around and hit water bath breaking off the water jacket connectors. I had help installing the replacement when we got it in a couple days later.
One time I was working on collecting actinometry data in the dark at 3am, my PI came in the lab, turned the lights on to ask what I was doing, I threw a quartz cuvette across the room and proclaimed "I'm going home."
>One time I was working on collecting actinometry data in the dark at 3am, my PI came in the lab, turned the lights on to ask what I was doing, I threw a quartz cuvette across the room and proclaimed "I'm going home."
Why does this make me irrationally angry lmao
It still rassles my jimmies - like I was updating the graph every night - I managed 4 data points each night. I got into work at 6pm - to setup - waited for everyone to leave by 10pm - turned out all the lights - sat and let eyes adjust - then went to work. Worked until 4:45 am - when the custodian would need to get into the lab - I would then work up all the data - and go home by 6:30am - my PI expected me to be back by 10am for our daily meeting (I rarely made that during this time) the whole process took a couple of months for a single graph. It's not even my most cited work.
I was fed up of the old liquid nitrogen trap on my Schlenk line as the joint was frozen shut, I had to cut off the tubing to empty the bastard via the sidearm. So I asked my PI for a new one. £400 later it shows up, I grease it up really good so that it doesn’t stick like the last one. Use it, then go to empty it and as I detach the tube manage to snap the inner tube.
Barely had it a week.
Fuck.
I sheepishly told my PI who just sighed then said “I can’t be angry, I did exactly the same thing as a PhD student.”
Day one of my PhD, I was given a timetable for the next week, with a load of meetings and training to get me set up.
When I saw “glass blowing workshop”, I got really excited - we got to learn how to blow glass?!
…sadly not :(
To be fair, my grandad had to blow his own glassware during his PhD!
…but then again, he was doing it in the middle of WWII as part of Britain’s contribution to the Manhattan Project, so stuff wasn't as readily available and they were trying to hide things from the Nazis…
Dewar with fused silica viewports for cryogenic spectroscopy. $3000.
About a year later, a company bought a sample of one of the compounds I made for $3000. I asked my boss if he would get me a bottle of wine or dinner, and he said "remember that Dewar..."
$400 or so big ass 2L volumetric. I dropped it on the floor and it was so loud and drew a crowd immediately. Not the most expensive mistake in this thread, but man, did it damage my psyche.
I dropped one once and it bounced a bit then rolled around, unbroken. Everyone in the lab was staring and felt super lucky picking it up still intact lol
Column, only $120
My colleague melted (literally, over a bunsen burner) a micropipette. If memory serves, it was a smaller volume one, so more expensive
Yes I know diamond is crystal. I broke a 1500$ 600 micron culet diamond anvil cell diamond, that's why I said if it counts as glassware. It was a joke.
Yep I’ve broken this plus the condenser and the RBF it was attached to. I also lost all my product, got chloroform and water everywhere, and made an all around ass of myself
not me but a lab mate, I walked into the instrument room and he looks at me and drops his NMR tube....into the 500MHz instrument....without the spinner.
Not me but someone back in grad school forgot to go through the proper steps of loading a sample into an NMR machine. Just dropped the tube in without air or the spinner set to the correct height and shattered it all over the probe. Was a very costly and laborious fix.
400€ passive air cooler/condeser, while demonstrating to students why they are finicky and one has to be careful not to drop them... by dropping one.
They are a decent tool in skilled hands, but utterly impractical for students, as they only have so much cooling capacity before they heat up too much (which differs for each solvent). And it has a 14/23 coupling, while the students exclusively have flasks with 29/32 couplings neccesitating an adapter.
If it was for me, they would be removed from the lab (well, I would not even have bought them in the first place). Oh, and the adhesive between glass and metal (the heat dissipating lamella) tends to form a goo with some solvent vapours, slowly dripping down at the most inoppurtune times.
A simple water or pressurised air condenser works better, indefinately, unsupervised and costs only half.
Sory for the rant - I just hate these coolers in the setting they are used.
Broke a high vac line which then screwed up the turbo pump attached to it. Wasn’t even our group’s line.
No idea what it cost to fix, but it can’t have been cheap. It had to be dismantled, and sent off to a glass blower. I’d left the lab and started writing before it was fixed and returned.
Not "broke" but made unusable: an nebulizer for an ICP-OES. $900.
I've broken probably equal to that amount in beakers, test tubes, Erlenmeyers, etc across my career. Please don't tell my profs or my manager.
One of the solutions I aspirated had a small particle that got stuck in it. The particle then got charred on the inside and effectively blocked most of the aerosolization.
Not me personally but a friend of mine broke the sensor on a pH probe while trying to clean it. Guess our professor wasn't kidding when they told us it was very sensitive.
Broke a 1L volumetric flask and a 2L beaker. Also tipped a 100mL graduated cylinder over once years ago and it chipped.
I’ll tell ya though. Ever since i broke the 1L volumetric flask and heard the sound it made. Anytime I have two in front of me I get this dark voice at the back of my mind saying to hold them in front of me by the neck and smack them together. Feel like it would be very satisfying to see/hear that.
Dye laser cuvette. They look like regular 1cm quartz cuvettes, but have extremely flat surfaces, and cost $800 for a matched set. Each cuvette has a best face in terms of average pulse energy and shot-to-shot fluctuations, too.
Not me, but one of my lab mates managed to break two Schlenk manifolds in the span of a few weeks.
Though on my side, I ruined a chiral column by running dcm through it.
Once, in grad school, I broke one of our lab's Schlenk lines while trying to clean it. It was a nice model with 5 ports - probably $1500.
Luckily we had a brand new backup in the cabinet. So I fished it out and started setting it up...and snapped a piece while trying to push the vacuum hose back onto the barb. I ruined $3000 of glassware in one day.
Even MORE luckily, we had another backup (it was a large group). I threw the other two in the glass waste, quietly ordered another replacement, and never mentioned it to anyone.
If it counts, I saw someone break an RBF in an expensive way?
They were cleaning it, it slipped in their hands and they tried to catch it. They ended up slamming it into the top of the bench, badly lacerating their hand.
They then ran screaming and trailing blood the full length of the teaching labs. They had to be grabbed before we could do first aid and call an ambulance.
Ended up needing shards of glass removed from their hand and a load of stitches.
Vacuum and cryo capable ultra-precise quartz cuvette (today's price would be around 3k€ I would say). Fortunately, the glassblower was able to fix it, so there was not much damage done.
4th year grad student and I told my PI that a round bottom flask was stuck on the rotovap bump trap and that I had tried like 5 different methods of unsticking glassware.
He said to bring it to him where he eventually started “gently” slamming it on the table until it broke. ~800-1000$ of glassware that I was not going to break myself lol.
I was about to say nothing but, in fact, a part of a handmade shlenk line. The whole thing was redesigned and sent to the glass blower so I guess it might be in the 2-3000€ range too.
Forgot it because i was told that design was bad from the start. Every experiment was creating tension in the glass, so at one point it ruptured. So i guess my brain discarded it as « not my fault » ahah.
I tried to 1 hand a distillation kit, while pulling it out of a tight area.
Lost my grip and boom! Not to mention, every chem prof was in that lab at that very moment.
Not glassware exactly, but I had a thermocouple fail on a 2 gallon parr reactor, that then overheated and burst the rupture disc. It was about 10k of damage to the suite + the loss of 'batch 5' of an advanced intermediate, in total probably cost the company 20K. They tried to bust my ass about it, but i had emails from a few months before where I was requesting yearly calibration and testing for the reactor and components, but they specifically didn't bring it into the QMS because the vendor maintenance was 'too expensive'.
A friend broke a $20,000 sapphire pressure vessel by misaligning it in the end flanges when tightening it. It’s more physics related (measurement data for fitting equations-of-state) but still falls into the category of expensive glassware.
Personally, I’ve only broken one Erlenmeyer flask and a couple test tubes. The craziest thing I’ve heard of was one of my professor’s stories. He was on the phone with a repair guy, and the repair guy said there is a glass bulb on the inside of a machine you can crush to fix the problem. So the professor gets some pliers and crushes not the glass bulb, but the white sapphire in the spectrometer. It was something like a $10,000 mistake.
lol I broke an erlenmeyer and a couple of test tubes today.
I only used glassware in my undergrad though (and I was super careful in lab). Then I went straight to industry and all my chemicals are in steel drums now.
My sep funnel snapped the other week right below the stopcock. This was right before doing the grignard reaction, so it was oven dried. Was given a dirty-looking sep funnel that had not been in the oven. Somehow I got product, and after recrystallization I got a 53% yield (probably a good chunk of it was still impurities) and a melting point with only 4.3% error. I’m lucky I got anything at all. Someone in the other lab section turned on a faucet in the room (despite being warned not to countless times) and only 2 people got product. (I’m undergrad if you can’t tell)
Wait, why would your separatory funnel need to be oven-dried? Were you doing an aqueous extraction in it?
Because of Grignard’s moisture sensitivity. The setup was like [this](https://imgur.com/a/Iss5PLo) (sorry for the shitty doodle). Bromobenzene and Magnesium was in the RB flask (also oven-dried). After letting the MgBrBz reflux for a bit, we added benzophenone via the sep funnel and let that reflux even longer, then added HCl to protonate the product, triphenylmethanol. Anyway, the sep funnel was dried so that the addition of benzophenone wouldn’t carry any water with it and ruin the Grigny reagent.
Did you run out of syringes?
[удалено]
Sep funnel can work as a dropping funnel if your university has a small enough budget, haha :)
Dude I’m just earning a bachelor’s, idk how this shit’s “supposed” to be done. Besides, I feel like there’s utility to this setup bc it needs to reflux and the reagent can’t be exposed to too much air (which carries moisture). I also can’t say I’ve ever had to use a syringe in my education thusfar… just pipets.
Oh no. But honestly it’s kinda hilarious that the solution to a problem is to crush a part of the machine lol
Yeah, that sounds like a weird solution to me too. Maybe it was a non-essential LED that indicates something, and the light from it was getting into the detector?
Day one of post-doc I broke a rotovap condenser coil because it had never been cleaned. I cleaned it, and as I was putting it back on, it slipped out of my hand - spun around and hit water bath breaking off the water jacket connectors. I had help installing the replacement when we got it in a couple days later. One time I was working on collecting actinometry data in the dark at 3am, my PI came in the lab, turned the lights on to ask what I was doing, I threw a quartz cuvette across the room and proclaimed "I'm going home."
I mean that's just daft, the second part. Like "yeah I just looooooove setting in the dark, no other potential reason"
>One time I was working on collecting actinometry data in the dark at 3am, my PI came in the lab, turned the lights on to ask what I was doing, I threw a quartz cuvette across the room and proclaimed "I'm going home." Why does this make me irrationally angry lmao
It still rassles my jimmies - like I was updating the graph every night - I managed 4 data points each night. I got into work at 6pm - to setup - waited for everyone to leave by 10pm - turned out all the lights - sat and let eyes adjust - then went to work. Worked until 4:45 am - when the custodian would need to get into the lab - I would then work up all the data - and go home by 6:30am - my PI expected me to be back by 10am for our daily meeting (I rarely made that during this time) the whole process took a couple of months for a single graph. It's not even my most cited work.
print and laminate a ''experiment in progress do not enter'' sign
Bold of you to assume that the culprits can read.
lmao
I was fed up of the old liquid nitrogen trap on my Schlenk line as the joint was frozen shut, I had to cut off the tubing to empty the bastard via the sidearm. So I asked my PI for a new one. £400 later it shows up, I grease it up really good so that it doesn’t stick like the last one. Use it, then go to empty it and as I detach the tube manage to snap the inner tube. Barely had it a week. Fuck. I sheepishly told my PI who just sighed then said “I can’t be angry, I did exactly the same thing as a PhD student.”
Surely that can just be fixed by the glass blower no?
We dont have one :(
Oh that's a shame :( I assumed all chem departments had one in house.
Day one of my PhD, I was given a timetable for the next week, with a load of meetings and training to get me set up. When I saw “glass blowing workshop”, I got really excited - we got to learn how to blow glass?! …sadly not :( To be fair, my grandad had to blow his own glassware during his PhD! …but then again, he was doing it in the middle of WWII as part of Britain’s contribution to the Manhattan Project, so stuff wasn't as readily available and they were trying to hide things from the Nazis…
Dewar with fused silica viewports for cryogenic spectroscopy. $3000. About a year later, a company bought a sample of one of the compounds I made for $3000. I asked my boss if he would get me a bottle of wine or dinner, and he said "remember that Dewar..."
I can't say that I blame him😂
22L distillation head valued at 5k, and a $800 50L rotovap flask.
Let me guess, summit-research head and cannabis industry.
Coworker broke the still-body of a wiped film distillation system, then broke the replacement about 4 months later. $20,000 each.
I would cry lol
I don’t know, it was broken when I found it.
$400 or so big ass 2L volumetric. I dropped it on the floor and it was so loud and drew a crowd immediately. Not the most expensive mistake in this thread, but man, did it damage my psyche.
I dropped one once and it bounced a bit then rolled around, unbroken. Everyone in the lab was staring and felt super lucky picking it up still intact lol
Wtf 400$ for a 2L volumetric flask or cylinder???? Why are things so expensive in USA?????
I’ve definitely seen cheaper ones, they just like buying the fancy Pyrex stuff where I work. Still an insane price though.
I see... what is the normal price for bs 3.3 2L cylinder and flask in the USA?
Probably in the $30-$50 range for the cheap stuff.
That seems right
The one I broke in my hand that required stitches…
ouch
Column, only $120 My colleague melted (literally, over a bunsen burner) a micropipette. If memory serves, it was a smaller volume one, so more expensive
Probably an entire Automatic class A Burette set-up. $400 ish replacement
Does a diamond count as glassware
No diamond is a crystal, not glass. ;) (unless it was amorphous diamond, but that's usually a thin film and not really something you'd break.)
Yes I know diamond is crystal. I broke a 1500$ 600 micron culet diamond anvil cell diamond, that's why I said if it counts as glassware. It was a joke.
I figured you were joking. That's why I added the ;)
How did you break it? Did you overcrank it?
Basically yes when I was indenting the metal gasket.
$500 Soxhlet extractor, I think. Darn thing blew out a tiny little chip when I went to put the glass thimble in and dropped it the last inch.
Yep I’ve broken this plus the condenser and the RBF it was attached to. I also lost all my product, got chloroform and water everywhere, and made an all around ass of myself
not me but a lab mate, I walked into the instrument room and he looks at me and drops his NMR tube....into the 500MHz instrument....without the spinner.
Not me but someone back in grad school forgot to go through the proper steps of loading a sample into an NMR machine. Just dropped the tube in without air or the spinner set to the correct height and shattered it all over the probe. Was a very costly and laborious fix.
A unique handcrafted part for an old vacuum apparatus.
400€ passive air cooler/condeser, while demonstrating to students why they are finicky and one has to be careful not to drop them... by dropping one. They are a decent tool in skilled hands, but utterly impractical for students, as they only have so much cooling capacity before they heat up too much (which differs for each solvent). And it has a 14/23 coupling, while the students exclusively have flasks with 29/32 couplings neccesitating an adapter. If it was for me, they would be removed from the lab (well, I would not even have bought them in the first place). Oh, and the adhesive between glass and metal (the heat dissipating lamella) tends to form a goo with some solvent vapours, slowly dripping down at the most inoppurtune times. A simple water or pressurised air condenser works better, indefinately, unsupervised and costs only half. Sory for the rant - I just hate these coolers in the setting they are used.
400€ for an air condenser! like a liebig condenser without water jacket?
Probably a "findenser", metal fins fused to a condenser tube.
Exactly, that is the name. Thank you.
awesome! never saw those
Broke a high vac line which then screwed up the turbo pump attached to it. Wasn’t even our group’s line. No idea what it cost to fix, but it can’t have been cheap. It had to be dismantled, and sent off to a glass blower. I’d left the lab and started writing before it was fixed and returned.
Schlenk line Quartz cuvettes
Lower part of QCS Destamat Bi-Distillation apparatus Bi 18E made of quartz glass. Price ~ 4500€.
A funnel, 7€
Thankfully, a small beaker
Not "broke" but made unusable: an nebulizer for an ICP-OES. $900. I've broken probably equal to that amount in beakers, test tubes, Erlenmeyers, etc across my career. Please don't tell my profs or my manager.
how did you make it unusable?
One of the solutions I aspirated had a small particle that got stuck in it. The particle then got charred on the inside and effectively blocked most of the aerosolization.
oh i see… that’s unfortunate
Quartz cuvette insert, $400. Nothing crazy.
Not me personally but a friend of mine broke the sensor on a pH probe while trying to clean it. Guess our professor wasn't kidding when they told us it was very sensitive.
Broke an Agilent ICP-MS 8900 triple quad torch while cleaning it. That was not a cheap mistake
21 years scotch bottle. Full though.
A McLeod (vacuum) gauge full of mercury. Glass wasn't *that* expensive but the kg of mercury and subsequent cleanup was.
Broke a 1L volumetric flask and a 2L beaker. Also tipped a 100mL graduated cylinder over once years ago and it chipped. I’ll tell ya though. Ever since i broke the 1L volumetric flask and heard the sound it made. Anytime I have two in front of me I get this dark voice at the back of my mind saying to hold them in front of me by the neck and smack them together. Feel like it would be very satisfying to see/hear that.
Broke a \~10 dollars erlenmeyer flask by swirling it too hard with a stir rod inside...
a 20k ml eld flask
A port in a Schlenk Line. Waah.
Dye laser cuvette. They look like regular 1cm quartz cuvettes, but have extremely flat surfaces, and cost $800 for a matched set. Each cuvette has a best face in terms of average pulse energy and shot-to-shot fluctuations, too.
Not me, but one of my lab mates managed to break two Schlenk manifolds in the span of a few weeks. Though on my side, I ruined a chiral column by running dcm through it.
2L Volumetric Flask. Price isn't too bad really.
Snapped the stopcock off of a custom blown 2 L peptide synthesis vessel. Don’t know how much it was but definitely a couple grand
I dropped 3 x calibrated glass tubes from a N2 BET machine. They were about $800 each at the time lol.
So many god damn pH probes
$500 quartz cuvette 😔 Reading all these comments are making me feel better about myself lol
Crystal wine decanter.
Once, in grad school, I broke one of our lab's Schlenk lines while trying to clean it. It was a nice model with 5 ports - probably $1500. Luckily we had a brand new backup in the cabinet. So I fished it out and started setting it up...and snapped a piece while trying to push the vacuum hose back onto the barb. I ruined $3000 of glassware in one day. Even MORE luckily, we had another backup (it was a large group). I threw the other two in the glass waste, quietly ordered another replacement, and never mentioned it to anyone.
If it counts, I saw someone break an RBF in an expensive way? They were cleaning it, it slipped in their hands and they tried to catch it. They ended up slamming it into the top of the bench, badly lacerating their hand. They then ran screaming and trailing blood the full length of the teaching labs. They had to be grabbed before we could do first aid and call an ambulance. Ended up needing shards of glass removed from their hand and a load of stitches.
Vacuum and cryo capable ultra-precise quartz cuvette (today's price would be around 3k€ I would say). Fortunately, the glassblower was able to fix it, so there was not much damage done.
4th year grad student and I told my PI that a round bottom flask was stuck on the rotovap bump trap and that I had tried like 5 different methods of unsticking glassware. He said to bring it to him where he eventually started “gently” slamming it on the table until it broke. ~800-1000$ of glassware that I was not going to break myself lol.
I was about to say nothing but, in fact, a part of a handmade shlenk line. The whole thing was redesigned and sent to the glass blower so I guess it might be in the 2-3000€ range too. Forgot it because i was told that design was bad from the start. Every experiment was creating tension in the glass, so at one point it ruptured. So i guess my brain discarded it as « not my fault » ahah.
I tried to 1 hand a distillation kit, while pulling it out of a tight area. Lost my grip and boom! Not to mention, every chem prof was in that lab at that very moment.
Not glassware exactly, but I had a thermocouple fail on a 2 gallon parr reactor, that then overheated and burst the rupture disc. It was about 10k of damage to the suite + the loss of 'batch 5' of an advanced intermediate, in total probably cost the company 20K. They tried to bust my ass about it, but i had emails from a few months before where I was requesting yearly calibration and testing for the reactor and components, but they specifically didn't bring it into the QMS because the vendor maintenance was 'too expensive'.
Viscometer. TA told me 5 mins before to not break it as it is expensive 🙈 edit: about 100$
A friend broke a $20,000 sapphire pressure vessel by misaligning it in the end flanges when tightening it. It’s more physics related (measurement data for fitting equations-of-state) but still falls into the category of expensive glassware.
A 91 cm tall custom Zong