[Histonet] Pipette Caliberation

[Amos Brooks]

Ade,
     The easy way is to send them to a company to have them caliberated.
Ranin does a great job of this.
     The hard way is to calibrate them yourself. Got time on your hands?
Good, Use 3 pipette intervals at 25%, 50% and 75% of the pipette's volume.
Set a weigh boat on a very sensitive electronic scale (which should also be
calibrated professionally). Draw deionized H2O 10 times for each pipette at
each interval. This also validates your drawing technique and consistency.
(DON'T FUDGE THE DATA). Enter this data into Excel or some such spread sheet
program.
     Now the fun part. Remember high school & college statistics and all
that number crunching. The spread sheet can do it all for you, but if you
don't know how the numbers are arrived at you won't know if the statistics
formulae are right. You really should get at least the average for each
interval, and the standard deviation at a pre-determined confidence interval
(at the very least 95%).
     I really recommend doing this at least once for the truly geeky of us.
This really justifies sending it to Ranin to business offices considering
how long it can take. The upshot is that the results are beautiful with
graphs and all. CAP totally leaves you alone if you can talk statistics.
Usually scares the hell out of them.

All the best,
Amos Brooks