[Nhcoll-l] Opening specimen jars with jammed ground glass stoppers?

[Rogers, Steve]

Greetings Truth,

A twist on the method both Paul and Dirk mentioned – run hot water along the outside of the jar lid juncture and set the jar in a bucket of the warmer water, but at the same time put ice cubes on top of the ground glass jar to keep that part of the jar from expanding. We had hundreds of larger sized ground glass jars holding large snakes, turtles and lizards that presented the same problems you describe in the 1990’s. A vice grip can help hold the lid top more stable than the hand when twisting. Only in a few cases did we have to break the seal by hitting the jar right at the juncture and no specimens were damaged.

Silicon seems odd – usually they used to use grease or Vaseline to help decrease the leakage of fluid.

Many museums have sold the cleaned out old jars including us and Harvard. https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/antique-specimen-apothecary-jar-lot-1896386260

The Carnegie Museum purchased many jars for our beginning fluid collections in the 1890’s from the Whitall Tatum company – pages 19 and 20 of this catalog. https://sha.org/bottle/pdffiles/WhitallTatum1894.pdf

Good luck.

Stephen P. Rogers (Mr.)
Collection Manager of Section of Birds  (and former Collection Manager of Amphibians and Reptiles)
Carnegie Museum of Natural History
4400 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh PA 15213-4080
Phone: 412-622-3255


From: Nhcoll-l <nhcoll-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu> On Behalf Of Dirk Neumann
Sent: Tuesday, October 15, 2019 5:02 PM
To: nhcoll-l at mailman.yale.edu
Subject: Re: [Nhcoll-l] Opening specimen jars with jammed ground glass stoppers?

Dear Truth,

the stoppers that are self-sealed and jammed can be opened by putting them under the tap and let hot water (approx. 40-50 °C) run on the stopper / neck of the jar. In case you have external labels attached to the outside of the jar, it is worth testing if they peel of or the ink starts bleeding (ah, Paul was faster with his reply :-)

The hot water widens the neck (expansion of the glass) while inside the jar the trapped gases expand and increase the internal pressure - be aware that up to 2bar of more could build up inside alcohol filled jars causing the jammed stopper to rocket-off in rare cases.

Silicone glued jars are more delicate. If the silicone is thick enough, you can use a sharp pointed knife to cut the glue between stopper and neck; never tried this in stoppered jars, in flanged jars you could carefully cut the lid of with sharp blades like scalpel, sharpened palette-knifes. There might be some chemical agents which could remove the silicone, but the issue here is that these may contaminate the holding fluid.

Hope this helps
Dirk


Am 15.10.2019 um 21:45 schrieb Truth Muller:
Hello,

I am currently one of a small team of students from College of the Atlantic doing extensive restoration work on the George B. Dorr Natural History Museum collections. We are preparing the entirety of the Museum's collections to be moved to a new, modern storage facility which is still under construction.

I am responsible for the Ichthyological and Marine Invertebrates wet collections, which have unfortunately suffered from neglect over the past 10-15 years. Only about 60-70% of the Ichthyological collection specimens are in modern jars with screw-top lids, and the rest are in e in much older jars with ground glass stoppers. Some of them are sealed with silicone, a few with an unidentified wax, and others have simply self-sealed with their own fluids congealing between the jar and the stopper. Many of these jars need to be topped off, and a few are cracked and urgently need to be replaced, but almost every single stopper is stuck fast as though super-glued. We have not yet found a way to open them without putting the specimens inside in harm's way.

What is the best method that we can use to open these jammed jars, preserving the specimen, and, ideally, the jars as well? Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated!

~Truth Muller
George B. Dorr Museum of Natural History
College of the Atlantic '21





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