asimplechord

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.