Straps

Problem: water bath sonicators at work won't stay closed. The model was poorly designed and the handle comes off all the time so we end up using tape to keep it shut, which is only inefficient but also only good for about one or two uses and super frustrating in the BSL3 lab because you can't always get the tape off of your gloves.

Solution: I was at home and threw something away that had a nylon strap attached to it... I don't remember what the strap was for, but I saw it and thought to myself, 'I could use this at work...'. So, I bought some velcro (the sticky kind so I could stick it to the walls of the sonicator) and I busted out my sewing machine and I got to work!!

I decided to color-code the ends of the straps so that people would regularly open and close on only one end (to keep the straps working strong), so one end had red color and the other was black (so you couldn't see it). I started going and about the time I had put 3 pieces of velcro on ends, by sewing machine started acting up. I took off the needle only to find that you should NOT use sticky velcro with your sewing machine. The speed of up-and-down sewing made the needle get all gunky and act up. So- off to Walmart for some non-sticky velcro (which only came in army green for some reason). Cleaned my needle then back to business. Everything was running much more smoothly. I put 1-inch squares of the soft half of the velcro on both ends of the same side of the strap. Then I put 2-inch sections of the rough part of the velcro on the sonicator itself so that you can tighten or loosen the strap if you want to.

You should have seen Jinhee's face when I showed him these. He's a post-doc in the lab and is the other major user of the sonicator other than myself. It was like a kid at Christmas... he thinks I should get some sort of prize for this, which I thought was cute.

The process:


The end result: