Need help identifying a medical or chemistry supply... thing.

Starhawk wrote 02/11/2018 at 05:32 0 points

Story time.

Once upon a time, in the mid-1990s, at the very very back of Northgate Mall in Durham, North Carolina, there was this weird little shop called The Scrap Exchange where you could fill a paper grocery bag, for $2 sharp, with whatever industrial surplus junk they had on hand. Barrels of "pool noodle" type pipe insulation and old Fujifilm containers and those spiral plastic spring-type binding things for notebooks that Staples will put on your term paper for far too much money. Boxes and bins of mesh and gadgets and bits and bobs and greeblies and all sorts of things that just defied any real description or label. Sometimes fabric remnants or ribbons worked their way into the mix. Occasionally other stuff, sometimes for a little extra. They had cast-off mechanical hamburger presses for $10 once. (I still wish that I'd had $10 that day.) Sometimes a barrel of bad 5.25" floppies would be there. Sometimes it would be full of little plastic pipettes. Sometimes it would have scratched-up laser printer drums. You get the idea. Junk of all kinds, to be re-purposed basically as craft supplies -- hot glue not included.

Last I heard, which was years ago, they'd expanded and moved to a warehouse somewhere else in the city. Google tells me they've moved and expanded again, and now have two locations and are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. I like this news -- that place was cool. Now if only I could get there lol... oh well. Can't have everything, I suppose.

*ahem*

I bought a lot of junk at that place, and -- two houses and almost three decades (!) later -- I still have a little of of it. I need to identify one piece of that stuff, now -- it looks, now, to me to be some sort of sample processing aide of some sort, for either medical or chemistry purposes. I want to get more of them, for a project idea of mine -- I've only two of them left now, after all, and one has a chunk out of it from age and general jostling around. But, thing is, I don't know what the devil to call them. Without a term to feed eBay... I'm kind of stuck.

That's where you folks come in. I hope. Here's a picture of one of these things --> https://imgur.com/a/Qcr6U

If you can tell me what to call that dang thing, some term I can feed eBay that will net results -- I'd be forever grateful...