Volumetric glassware: calibration and good laboratory practice

Analysts and technicians who prepare standards and dilutions, and quality staff who decide which glassware needs in-house calibration.

Covers both glass volumetric ware and piston pipettes, which fail in different ways and are often treated identically.

The syllabus below is the standard shape of the course. It is adjusted to the matrices, methods and instruments you actually run, which is agreed before delivery rather than discovered on the day.

• Classes and tolerances

  Class A and B, what the tolerance means, and to-contain versus to-deliver

• Gravimetric calibration

  Weighing the delivered water and converting via its density

• Temperature

  Correcting to 20 °C, and the error introduced by ignoring it

• Piston pipettes

  Accuracy and precision checks, tip fit, technique and pre-wetting

• Technique

  Meniscus reading, delivery time, drainage and the errors each introduces

• Programme

  Which items are calibrated, at what interval, and which are simply replaced

Courses are written around what a delegate can do afterwards, not what was presented to them. These are the outcomes this one is built to produce.

1. 01Calibrate a volumetric item gravimetrically and calculate the corrected volume.
2. 02Decide which glassware in your laboratory warrants calibration and which does not.
3. 03Identify a piston pipette that has drifted before it affects results.
4. 04Correct volumetric technique errors that a tolerance class cannot protect against.

A Class A flask guarantees a tolerance when used correctly at 20 °C. Neither condition is automatically true in a working laboratory, and both are inside the analyst’s control.

Piston pipettes are the bigger exposure. They drift with use, they are used constantly for the most critical volumes, and unlike glass they give no visual sign of being wrong.

Delivered over 1 day, at your site or at the laboratory, in English or Arabic. Sessions are built around real records, real data and real failures rather than slides of clause numbers, and the people delivering them spend the rest of the week doing the thing being taught.

Group size is agreed in advance — practical sessions are capped so that everyone works rather than watches. An attendance certificate is issued to each delegate on completion.

Ask about any subject not listed here. If it is not something we teach well, we will say so rather than build it for the sake of the booking.