Category: science kits

10:28 – The book is complete and off to the editors. For the next few weeks, I’ll be working with the editors and layout/design folks, answering queries, incorporating edits, and otherwise cleaning up before the book actually goes to print. I also have some book-related stuff to do. For example, we included a link to a biology landing page on thehomescientist.com website, which has to be created, along with all of the pages that it links to.

Starting today, I’m going through the manuscript. Each lab session has a list of items required, separated into groups of those included in the kit and those the reader supplies. I have to consolidate those lists so that I can come up with a final BoM for the kits. I’ll also consolidate the user-supplied item lists so that readers will have a single list of items they’ll need to acquire.

I’d thought about including a basic set of ten or so prepared slides as a standard part of the kits. I decided against that, mainly because some readers may already have prepared slide sets, and it makes no sense to duplicate. Instead, I’ll do what I originally planned, and make a core slide set an optional item, or indeed possibly a separate SKU. The slide set may or may not be available initially with the kits. Obviously, there are many sources for prepared slides.

The other reason I need to get the kit BoM finalized is so that I can do some price and cost calculations. At this point, I don’t have a firm idea how much the kits will cost to build or how much we’ll need to charge for them. My original goal was $175 or less with shipping but not including prepared slides, and I’d like to keep it to $160 or less if possible. There are many variables to consider, not least the physical size of the kit. If it’ll all fit into a USPS Priority Mail large flat-rate box, for example, I know my shipping costs will be about $15 per kit, regardless of weight or distance. If it won’t fit, I’ll have to buy regular boxes at maybe a buck or so each delivered and pay PM weight/distance rates, which’ll vary according to how much the kit ends up weighing and how far it’s going. In that case, assuming the kit weighs 10 pounds, my average shipping cost is going to be a good bit higher. I could use parcel post, which would cut the shipping cost significantly, but at the expense of typical 7 to 10 business day delivery time rather than the 1 to 3 days with PM. I suspect most kit buyers aren’t going to want to wait.

08:51 – We should finish the manuscript today, with two days to spare. Barbara is cleaning house this morning and then heading over to her parents’ house for lunch. We’ll shoot the final images this afternoon.

While I was doing laundry yesterday I had a few minutes to spare so I decided to make up the eosin Y stain for the biology kits. Eosin Y stain sold by most lab supply vendors can be anything from 0.2% to 1% eosin in either water or alcohol. Normally, the only other component is a preservative to prevent mold growth, usually a pinch of thymol or a few drops of chloroform per liter. But I’d been doing some research, and it seems that acidifying the stain with 1% or so acetic acid gives much better results.

So I dissolved 5 grams of eosin Y in nearly a liter of distilled water. It formed a very dark red solution that was so intensely-colored it was opaque even holding the bottle up to a strong light. I added 10 mL of glacial acetic acid and was surprised to see a distinct color change to almost orange. I’ll have to do a comparison test with the acidified eosin Y against neutral aqueous and alcoholic eosin Y before I use this for kits, but I suspect it’ll work very well.

10:41 – All of the chapters are complete and off to the editors except the Introduction, which is in progress now. This weekend, we need to shoot some images to replace placeholders in the text. We also need to build the gel electrophoresis apparatus and run a gel or two.

Monday, I start going through the manuscript chapters to build a list of what’s to be included in the biology kit, including amounts. Once I have that, I can start generating purchase orders for the materials and start actually making up chemicals, printing labels, filling and labeling bottles, and so on.

I’ve also decided to offer two options with the biology kit. First, a simple hand microtome. Second, a core set of maybe 20 to 25 prepared microscope slides. For those, I’ll focus on slides that are particularly important, hard to find elsewhere (particularly in standard sets), and difficult to prepare yourself (sections, special staining, and so on rather than simple whole mounts of common things). I’ll also focus on double- and triple-purpose slides. For example, a lot of slide sets include cross-sections of monocot and dicot roots, stems, and leaves, along with slides showing skeletal, smooth, and cardiac muscle. That’s nine separate slides, but I can do the same thing with only four slides: monocot and dicot roots on one slide, monocot and dicot stems on one slide, monocot and dicot leaves on one slide, and three types of muscle on one slide. The individual combined slides are usually a bit more expensive than single-specimen slides, but nowhere near twice as much.

One of the wholesalers I’ll probably buy some of those slides from packages them in boxes of 50 of the same slide, so I’ll put 50 sets together initially. I have no idea what percentage of people who order the biology kit will want the optional prepared slides, but I suspect 50 slide sets will suffice for the first 60 kits, if not many more. Delivery time on the slides is typically 60 days ARO, so we may have some juggling to do. That delivery time means I also need to get the slides on order no later than mid-February if I want to have them available by mid- to late April.

08:09 – I should finish the lab session on simulated DNA gel electrophoresis today and get it off to the reviewers. Finish in the sense of finish writing it. I haven’t actually done the lab session yet. I’ll do it this weekend, when we’ll also be shooting a lot of images for it and other lab sessions. That leaves only the introduction, which is in progress. It looks like we’re actually going to make the 31 January deadline.

Not that things settle down much after that. In addition to a flow of of queries and edits, I have to get the kit contents finalized and purchase orders cut for components. The biology book hits the bookstores in April, and by that time I want to have 60 finished biology kits in inventory and ready to ship, along with components in the pipeline for many more.

The next project is a complete re-write of the forensics lab book that we finished a couple of years ago but was never published. I want to rewrite that book around a custom kit, which will make it much more accessible to home schoolers and hobbyists. I’d like to have that book complete, at least in PDF form, and kits available in time for summer session, although realistically it’ll probably be in time for autumn semester.

Farther out, but still on the horizon, I’d like to do a second edition of Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments, this one kit-based. Two kits, actually. One for first-year labs (the current chemistry kit) and one for second-year.

It’s going to be a busy year.