Well, I feel like a real dope for asking, but, what pipettes are y'all using for your bench testing, these days?

My purchasing coordinator is at her absolute wits-end trying to find blood bank suitable pipettes.  She has orders in to every manufacturer imaginable for standard blood bank soda lime glass pipettes.  Additionally, we've seemingly burned through every available stash of borosilicate glass pipettes she can get her hands on.  We've now moved on to the smallest available plastic transfer pipettes (that still deliver a standard blood bank-sized drop), but may need to switch to larger transfer pipettes!  

Anyone have a source they want to share? 

We get ours from Medline.  800-MEDLINE.   Ref# MLABTP5NGRAD

We are using CH5214-18 from Cardinal - plastic, 2 mL, consistent drop size for Blood Bank. Had some trouble getting them for a while about a year or so ago, but not recently (knock on wood and rub my lucky rabbit foot!).

20 hours ago, AMcCord said:

We are using CH5214-18 from Cardinal - plastic, 2 mL, consistent drop size for Blood Bank. Had some trouble getting them for a while about a year or so ago, but not recently (knock on wood and rub my lucky rabbit foot!).

Agree with AMcCord. We use Cardinal CH5214-18. 

Question: why are you looking for glass pipettes? We were forced to stop using glass pipettes years ago by our infection control team (glass breakage/employee injury risk). We were able to keep the glass tubes because of the potential effect on antibody detection. I do not believe using plastic pipettes pose any risk though.

I have not used glass pipettes in quite a few years, ever since the powers that be determined that they were unsafe. We use the Cardinal pipettes now.

On 4/4/2023 at 8:07 AM, jayinsat said:

Question: why are you looking for glass pipettes? We were forced to stop using glass pipettes years ago by our infection control team (glass breakage/employee injury risk). We were able to keep the glass tubes because of the potential effect on antibody detection. I do not believe using plastic pipettes pose any risk though.

Not looking for glass, per se... but, we had still been using traditional soda lime blood bank pipettes You know... because... "That's what we always use!" .   I guess no one here cares about safety! 

When we ran into manufacturing shortages of those, we used up the leftover glass borosilicate pipettes from the core lab.  Now, we're on to plastic (Cardinal CH5214-12 or CHB521412), which is probably what we'll stick with.

Thanks for your input, everyone!