Someone in the lab heard I had a 3D printer and asked me to make a replacement part for a broken PCR machine. The part was a flat black rail that was used as a lid interlock by the machine, to hold the heated lid down on samples during PCR.

Because the part was just screwed down, I measured the dimensions of the lid interlock and the screws for the original part, and threw something together in OpenSCAD (after much procrastination).

It's not as sturdy as the original part, but as anyone who works in a lab will know, the costs of getting anything technical repaired often exceed the price of a new machine. So, I'll just print 20 of these so the machine can have a nice long life!

The machine was, to be precise, a big red Biometra T-gradient machine, which the lab was using to do 96-well plate PCRs. The heated lid was essential for the task or the samples would all evaporate.

The Gcode file should be compatible with any machine extruding at the regular 220C, and prints a pair. They require paring with a sharp or scissors to bevel the edges of the tab and to make the tab smaller; recompiling the STL from the OpenSCAD file to make it thinner might help matters but was not essential for me.