Fings ain't what they used ter be.

I've been working in the lab pretty much since I was 17 (the school lab doesn't count - Lab? hah!).

Since that time I've been using automatic pipettes made by a company called Gilson. They have been the final word in pipetting performance since that time, despite being compared to a number of other popular brands. Gilson pipettes are legendary for reliability and performance.

Recently we've decided to equip every person in the lab with their own set. Some of these were our old pipettes, sent off for service and calibration, others were bought brand new. In a previous company we operated a scheme like this, with internal calibrations and each person testing their own set every month. Reliability was high and failures few and far between: we had internally produced specifications that were both real and tight.

We had issues about a year ago, when the instruments we had were last serviced. They came back with issues that became progressively worse and were 'fixed' internally, rather than be without our pipettes for a few weeks. This should have been a warning to me.

Our new pipettes are, frankly, lousy.

Some vary considerably between operators. Some require specific tip types, and not all the same. Precision is often not great and accuracy has been laughable for some instruments. We've been evaluating them for a ridiculous amount of time now - it should have been a case of the instruments arriving, bashing through the tests and just approving them. Instead we've each spent nearly a man-day testing, only for half of them not to come up to spec. A little while ago the UK Gilson distributor ran an advert warning people about using other suppliers that 'might' service them using cheap parts made in China, leading to problems with reliability. The manner in which these pipettes behave is JUST LIKE the way they described the copy parts performance.

If I ever start buying pipettors from scratch again I shall look at someone else's instruments. We have had to invest far too much time in these shonky things, and I've lost faith in the ability of the UK supplier to do a worthwhile job. I need to consider carefully whether I'm willing to take on the paperwork burden required to go through non-conforming a supplier under the quality management system.

Sorry to talk shop.