96 well to 384 well pipetting guide

This came about when the pipetting robot in the local microbiology lab involved in COVID testing broke down, requiring the team to manually consolidate the contents of 4 96 well plates in a consistent, error-free and known pattern into a 384 well plate for the next step of the assay. The jig sits on the 384 well plate with position A at top left. and the 96 holes allow a regular subset of the wells to be filled using 8 or 12 channel pipettes. The jig is then rotated 180 degrees in the horizontal plane so B is at top left, exposing another set of 96 wells. It is then flipped right to left so C is at top left to expose the 3rd set, then rotated 180 degrees in the horizontal plane again so D is at top left. The freecad file has the 384 well centres, and the middle of a corner well as reference objects. It requires support for printing so a dual channel printer is needed. Thanks to Simon Friar from the local PHE COVID team for the suggestion of flipping a plate, rather than printing 4 different plates.
We printed in PLA and they are totally wipeable with ethanol, bleach etc. We also enquired about cost of having them CNC milled from a corrosion resistant aluminium alloy and for a batch of about 10 it was not a huge amount of money - even with polishing and anodising if you wanted to go down a permanency route.

Feb 2022 - .stl and .iges formats added after request