What is this?

I wanted to show a different idea for a cuvette frame, with emphasis on simplicity of construction to allow for home-building.

What did I do?

I purposely made this in a huge hurry, using only a paper cutter, tape and a pocket knife. It took about 2 minutes to complete (and it shows!)

A final design would of course be of higher precision, and fit into a box, not just a sleeve. I was trying to make it easy to take apart and fuss.

Here are the total parts I used. It's a larger piece to serve as the body. Would eventually be a full enclosure box. Then there are three squares, two with cuvette-size hole cut out, one solid. There are two strips of paper that are rolled up to fit into the sleeve. One is ~3/8" and the other ~1 1/2", and the length is arbitrary (as they roll up).

this is the "exploded view" trying to show the order these things drop into the housing.

The housing just looks like this:

The angluar piece is just a couple strips stapled together to provide a strong base where the cuvette touches down. I just took one strip of 1 1/2" paper, ripped it and stapled it as shown, then bent to fit in base of the sleeve.

The first frame piece just keeps the base of cuvette from kicking out, so it's only a bit above the base.

Questions and next steps

Well, it's just a quick mockup. Would need hole through the housing and the lifter strip in order to allow light to come from the fluoresced cuvette, and to get from the light source to the sample. This could be done simply, by just cutting out from the strip, or be reimagining that main strip to be some other form of support for the top cuvette holder, with that in mind.

Why am I interested?

After hearing feedback from a beta OTK user that it took them 3+ hours to fold the kit, we started jotting down ideas on how to drastically simplify the construction. Also in order to allow more people to participate in research in this direction, without needing a kit from us. Design goal was "what is the quickest way I can get a light-tight cuvette frame, with no special tools?"