Hanson's Helpful Hints (or handy things to know)

• By using the small (ca. 1/2 inch OD) vacuum tubing and a plastic syringe, you can pipette cleanly and with fairly accurate delivery volumes.   stretch one end of a one inch length of tubing over a 2 ml plastic syringe, and insert your pipettes into the other end of the hose.  Much longer lived than standard pipette bulbs and less messy.
• Use a quick connect on an air hose (the small end of the quick connect) to push solvents through microscale columns made from pipettes.  It's much more convenient than pipette bulbs.
• When combining column fractions, use "vacuum adapters" common for distillations .  It's the piece that has a female joint on top, a mail joint on bottom and a side-arm.  Equip the top with a rubber septum and teflon cannula to combine column fractions.  Apply a vacuum using an aspirator and siphon your fractions into a flask.
• Use a long needle attached to an air hose to dry your NMR tubes.
• The 200 MW rule... anything under 200 molecular weight won't survive long on a high vacuum system.
• Use a 16x100 test tube and 14/20 yellow "caplug" for small scale extractions.  The "caplug" fits tightly enough that the tube can be inverted without spillage. 
• The empty automatic pipetter tip cases (for 200 microliter) make excellent stands for NMR tubes.
• When using microliter syringes with metal complexes, such as Titanium Isopropoxide, rinse it immediately afterward with organic solvent followed by acid, then clean as usual.
• Never ever use a brush to clean out a high pressure reaction vessel or pressure tube.  The brush can make tiny scratches on the inside and cause the glass to fail at high pressure.

TLC stain recipes (PDF)