To Cut or Not-to-Cut

To Cut or Not-to-Cut? Is buying pre-cut stainless steel tubing worth the premium?

When plumbing your HPLC system, it is important that your tubing ends are flat and bur-free. This allows the tubing to sit uniformly against the bottom of the receiving port, helping to prevent extra column volume effects in the system.

Although it is possible to cut tubing in the lab, care must be taken as simpler errors can make jagged tube ends which lead to extracolumn effects in a HPLC system. As HPLC detectors are getting more sensitive and column ID’s are getting smaller, extra volume effects are more pronounced, and care should be taken to minimize un-needed volume. For this reason, we recommend pre-cut Stainless Steel tubing.

If it is needed to cut SS tubing in the lab, we recommend the Terry-Tool. The Terry Tool is designed to rotate about the tubing axis and then remove the Terry Tool from the tubing and apply slight pressure at both sides of the cut groove and snap the tubing apart. When done correctly, the Terry Tool cuts without deforming the tubing so nuts and ferrules slip on and no additional reaming or deburring is usually required.

For the chromatographer that has exacting requirements for today’s analyses, we recommend pre-cut 316 SS tubing. Thorough preparation guarantees that pre-cut SS tubing is truly ready-to-use, with flat-burr-free ends and a clean finish, which ensures zero dead volume connections and good chromatographic results. Each machine-cut end is polished, deburred on the edges and passivated.

In summary, we recommend purchasing pre-cut lengths of SS tubing, especially when trying to minimize extracolumn effects in the HPLC system.