screwing up (in new & innovative ways)
July 1st, 2009 by Ψ*ΨLet’s preface this with an admission: I’m an incoming first year, and while I’m not switching fields (carbon-based electronics FTW!), I am working on a totally different aspect of the research. There’s a lot of adjustment involved in making that switch, and a lot of room for messing things up horribly. This is to be expected, though–comes with learning new things. In the first few labs I worked in, I was a little upset at not being able to do things perfectly the first try. This is lab #7 for me, though: by now I expect to fuck things up, and am generally unfazed by it in the beginning.[1]
Most of what I’m fucking up these days involves my new arch nemesis: GLOVEBOX. I was a perfectly content and fairly dexterous glovebox virgin until a little over two weeks ago. Then I became the clumsiest person I know! In my defense, I wear an XS glove. I dare you to try doing delicate work with normal gloves that are a few sizes too large. You will contaminate, drop or destroy maybe half of what you touch, and you will be extremely frustrated at having a bunch of extra useless glove hanging off the end of your fingers.[2] I am well acquainted with this frustration because many stockrooms don’t carry XS sizes (tip for my tiny-handed brethren: check the bio stockrooms, they are often nice to us). Nothing I do will make the evil glovebox gloves come even close to fitting my hands. I dislike them greatly, but they are a necessary evil.
If that weren’t enough, it’s also been quite a while since I used tweezers.[3] There are quite a few steps in solar cell fabrication & testing, so–as you may imagine–many opportunities to screw up. Drop a film, or scratch it, or get it dusty, and it shorts out. I thought I had already explored most of the multitude of ways to screw up during the fabrication process, but yesterday I surprised myself.[4] It turns out that the nitrogen gun we use to blow away dust is more powerful than I thought:
See where it’s reddish…and then it isn’t in one patch? Yup! That’s a giant hole in the film. I managed to blow it off the substrate. Didn’t even know that was possible! Some mistakes are hard not to laugh at.
[1] #7 if you only count paying labs. Otherwise, #8. Gotta start somewhere 
[2] Actually, even XS gloves have a bit more fingertip than I need. Hold your hand up to mine sometime: you will feel like a GIANT.
[3] Wasp dissection FTW! Well, FTL is more like it. I mangled quite a few flea-sized braconids before the entomologists decided it was easier if they just pulled the legs off for me.
[4] My least favorite way to screw up is to drop the device holder mask thingie into the evaporator. It’s heartbreaking because then all your films fall out and get mangled and you have to somehow find them and get them out.
You’re going to be there a while, might as well get started on a custom glovebox.
We put diffusing filters on our nitrogen guns, chills ‘em out quite a bit.
Also, there’s always another kind of tweezers out there, some of which are much gentler and more stable than others.
Custom glovebox? I wish! Might have to look into the diffusing filters.
(Is this going to be another 3AM-still-in-the-office night for you?)
you know, they do make glove box gloves in smaller sizes…
but then the guys with the ginormous hands would complain. and they have seniority…
i’d better just get used to it.
Maybe you could get some kind of hand-enlargers, with extra long finger bits that attach to your normal fingers!
that’s not a bad idea–it would be a little weird at first, but the extra glove bits wouldn’t be an issue. i wonder where i might find such things?
You could try pumping in a pair of nitrile or latex gloves to put over the glovebox ones for added grippey-ness.
Yeah, I think Mike has the best suggestion for a common drybox. It also helps cut down contamination from student to student.
When I had a research group we kept a selection of disposable gloves in the box with the idea that they would go on over the glovebox gloves to make them tight. Yes, you will rip through a lot of gloves so take in extra. One student said that it was a finger tip issue and just used really tight finger cots over the glovebox fingers. She also used thick rubber bands to cut down on “glove flap”.
Another problem that I had was that one of my students was a real “damp” guy. The precious bodily fluids would actually run out of the gloves and one student objected that following him in the drybox was like “re-using a condom”. I ended up buying disposable examination gloves from a veterinary supply vendor that would cover him from the the fingertips to the armpit. And peace descended on my happy little group.
Do you also have a little wooden box to stand on? All my female students had to have custom height wooden platforms made to work comfortably in the box for very long.
That’s definitely worth a shot, and I can try it next time I’m in there–gloves aren’t hard to come by. Do they stay on when students pull their hands out?
Nope, just more debris that comes out with your experiment. You do have to be careful with the gloves in the port though. The gloves will fly around when you evacuate the port and can be pulled into the vacuum pump.
If you do bring a whole box of gloves in make sure you pump it down for a LONG time, like a day or so.
Also I found that wearing a pair of cotton “artifact” gloves on your hands helps to fill the gaps in larger gloves (and absorbs sweat too!).
1) Additionally secure the gloves’ wide ends to their ports with a couple or three wraps of tensioned stretchy black vinyl electrical tape slopping onto the metal. The SOP naked giant o-ring is not nearly as secure as it looks (though it only fails during emergency situations). Wrap over it. A giant worm clamp cuts into the rubber. Wrap under it.
2) You can diddle finger extension protoypes with Sculpey polymer clay (high solids PVC plastisol) that bakes sufficiently hard. Have the boss buy it. Do NOT cure in a drying oven – the plasticizer migrates. Permanet replacements from epoxy putty. Easier to fold back the excess fingers with acceptable elastomer bands (sulfur in rubber!)
3) Wear white balance gloves in the drybox gloves. No matter how much your confreres love you, residual pools of hand sweat are not fetish entities.
4) Cellulose is 10 wt-% water at ambient equilibrium. Dry cellulose is brittle. If you want cellulose in the glove box and water matters, pump in a vacuum oven at about 50 C for a couple of hours before going through the antechamber immediately thereafter.
5) A replaced (but not holed) drybox glove is the world’s finest base bath glove. 4 gallons of biological denatured (i-PrOH not MIBK denaturant) ethanol and a bottle of KOH in a covered polyethylene bucket. Stir well.
6) Don’t stand on scissor jacks, wipe off nose prints, and have a fallback if a flask in the vacuum antechamber pops – run a sufficiently large ID line line to vent the vacuum pump to hood.
7) “Always marry a woman with small hands…”
Sorry – I managed to screw up without a glove box, and the thought of working with Schlenk lines made me uncomfortable.
Maybe you could get a waldo?
Is that P3HT/PCBM? It might be noteworthy that the stuff was able to be blown off. A solar cell with poor contacts wouldn’t be too great. Kinda like when you anneal a P3HT/PCBM cell too much, mobility goes up because the P3HT becomes more crystalline, but efficiency goes down as the PCBM and P3HT phases separate more. I forget who he was, but one guy gave a seminar talk here about the interface between the active layer and the PEDOT hole transport layer being important. Just thoughts.
P3HT/PCBM, but only to get me better acquainted with the process. Don’t want to piss off collaborators by using non-commercially available materials for practice
The rest of the films (identical conditions) were fine…I was holding the nitrogen gun too close. Now I know better
My life is now inside a glovebox and on a schlenk line. You’ll adapt over time, but get used to being clumsy at first.
I thought I had a decent lab experience when I started in grad school. So, the first thing I did in my new group on the first day was to implode a giant glass Dewar – that Dewar was about 5 ft tall (including the casings) and when I hit by the liquid nitrogen hose it produced an impressive bang and my colleagues turned around and run to me just in time to see the silver glass shreds raining all over the place like New Years confetti. About week after that I had a problem when closing antechamber on their antiquated glove box. (I worked with glovebox before so I was pretty confident). That door would not latch. Eventually I mastered all my force and pulled on the antechamber door leaver – and then a hinge pin broke and the door fell on the floor…It took over a week for our machine shop to make a replacement pin – and meanwhile all my colleagues were cursing that new imbecile student who put their glovebox out of commission…
Ew, gloveboxes! Me hates ittttttt!
Sorry, had a flashback there. (shudder)