come on, sweet catastrophe

[asimplechord]

Dude. People from Internal Medicine used our ultracentrifuge for an eighteen hour run at 60k rpm Friday night into Saturday and broke it. Literally broke the spindle right off. I don't even know how you do that.

ETA: Are you fucking KIDDING ME? They are trying to say that our centrifuge fucked up their rotor? Um, no. Just. NO. Especially when they had already tried two other 'fuges and had them stop mid-run for no apparent reason. Don't even.

Comments

[chiraljhae.livejournal.com]

WOW.

What in the world requires and 18 hour spin at 60K rpm? I mean, maybe my experience is limited but the most I've ever heard of at any rpm is 1 hr. 18 hours?!?! In an ultracentrifuge?!? Dude!

[asimplechord.livejournal.com]

I've done spins that long in an analytical ultracentrifuge, but never that long in a preparative one. And by its very nature, the sample size for an analytical run is very small, so rotor and spindle problems are extremely rare - you're more likely to have a problem with your cell or the window or detector or something. For this one? Eh, I don't know. I think they are in the Infectious Diseases division, and viral particle isolation sometimes requires long-ish spins, but 18 hours does seem excessive.

They'd already had problems finding a running centrifuge in their dept (I don't even know, right? It's IM, they should have tons of money and equipment as a clinical (thus, billing) dept.) and were desperate, so we let them use our older 'fuge with their rotor. When I left at ~7:30 or so, it had been running for over three hours at speed with no problems, but apparently something happened.

Re: that other thing. Do you feel like had enough of a rapport to contact Agi (Dr. Schonbrunn) and talk to her? Do you think that would be at all helpful? Or do you want to stay in-program?

[fiona-fawkes.livejournal.com]

I'm almost afraid to ask what the hell they were doing that required an EIGHTEEN HOUR RUN!

[asimplechord.livejournal.com]

I think it was isolation of viral particles. Dunno. I mean, I know you can do CsCl gradients in overnight runs, but I didn't think that was what they were doing. It wasn't a swing-bucket rotor or anything, just a normal 70Ti.

[a-carnal-mink.livejournal.com]

Huh. I've never heard of anyone actually breaking one...

[asimplechord.livejournal.com]

I've seen the results when someone didn't screw the rotor lid on properly or when the the tubes weren't balanced. Seriously, 60k is more than 250k times the force of gravity; spinning that fast unbalanced is an invitation to destruction. But it was balanced! It spun for >3 hours before it had a problem. I don't have any idea what could have caused the problem. Although, yeah, I wouldn't have trusted that a vacuum would be pulled for that long, personally. I don't know. The rotor is sitting in my lab, waiting for the Beckmann repair guy. They were doing a CsCl gradient with ethidium in it, and it doesn't smell like bleach so I don't think it's been decontaminated, so I don't want to touch it. I don't want anything to do with it at all, but my lab is the one closest to the 'fuge in question, so somehow I am the default contact person for it.