To Cut or Not-to-Cut

To Cut or Not to Cut: Is Paying Extra for Pre-Cut Stainless Steel Tubing Worth It?

When setting up your HPLC system, it's crucial that the ends of your tubing are flat and free of burrs. This ensures that the tubing fits evenly against the receiving port, helping to minimize extra column volume effects in the system.

While it's possible to cut tubing in the lab, it's important to exercise caution. Simple mistakes can result in jagged tube ends, which contribute to extracolumn effects in an HPLC system. As HPLC detectors become more sensitive and column IDs decrease, these extra volume effects become more noticeable. To reduce unnecessary volume and improve system performance, we recommend using 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.