3D printed 15 to 50 ml tube rotator converter

Sometimes you just need to leave something in the lab, but you might not always have the right sized rotator brackets. This is the situation that pops up in my lab, where we have a rotator in the cold room - one of those old classics which is probably older than me and will outlive us all - but which only fits 15 ml tubes. I decided to solve this problem over

Enter the 3D printer. I knocked together a couple of quite prototype models in Tinkercad, then one quick test and a re-tweak later I've got a working adapter, letting you rotate 50 ml conicals in 15 ml brackets. I've put it up on Thingiverse so anyone can download the STL and make it themselves.

This is the joy of 3D printers; I went from a problem to a solution after an hour's work. There's probably a whole host of other little problems or inefficiencies that could be solved in the lab with the addition of a custom bit of kit - we just need to be clever about thinking what those are and how to build them!