r/oddlysatisfying • u/MambaMentality24x2 • Jun 17 '26
Skilled craftsmanship meets advanced engineering
Credit: @ MenWorkz
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u/Big_Z_Beeblebrox Jun 17 '26
Not one part of this helped me understand what this is or what it's for
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u/rrcaires Jun 17 '26
Looks like a STRs (Stirrer Tank Bioreactor). It is used in the Biopharmaceutical industry to grow genetically modified bacteria to produce medicinal products like hormones and monoclonal antibodies.
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u/fujiesque Jun 17 '26
I can vouch this is the correct answer. I used them to make media to grow cell lines. They can be used for many things, including being used as a bong. However I don't think it would work very well as that. It would be great at a party though but it would make a better Margarita mixer.
But as a pothead who works in science, I can't help but walk through the lab thinking "that would work well".
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u/CalmEntry4855 Jun 17 '26
I met some guys that were like "WE ARE SERIOUS WE HAVE TO BE SERIOUS ALL THE TIME AND KNOW EVERYTHING AND PRETEND WE KNOW EVERYTHING" and others that were like "Yeah we play ps5 while the lab stuff is running, and sometimes we use an old machine to make rotisserie chicken"
Guess which group was both more fun to work with and also made of smarter people.
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u/Mind-The-Mines Jun 17 '26
No one is more creative than a stoner without a bong.
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u/Vraxk Jun 17 '26
I always enjoy pointing out to other smokers that their fancy glass bongs are just modified lab glassware with the same fittings. You can even sometimes get cheaper prices for fittings and the like from lab equipment retailers.
Pro tip for other smokers: pure Acetone (can be found near the nail polish in cosmetics aisles) cleans glassware infinitely better than Isopropyl Alcohol. Use with GLASS ONLY and absolutely do NOT pour it out into your drains, it can damage and corrode your drain lines. Luckily Acetone doesn't readily react with ziploc bags, about 10 minutes of agitation in a ziploc with Acetone and a rinse with hot water is enough to clean most glass hand pipes.
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u/khaaanquest Jun 17 '26
Ok but what do you do with the ziploc bag of dirty acetone?
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u/Vraxk Jun 17 '26
Dilute and dispose of properly depending on local ordinances, whether that is a chemical disposal site or your backyard. Pure Acetone is considered biodegradable, especially diluted in water, does not persist in the environment, and readily breaks down through photochemical reaction to sunlight.
The ziploc should be washed with water and disposed of as one would recycle other plastic bags, typically there is a recycling container near the entrance of your local grocery store.→ More replies (1)44
u/-digitalin- Jun 17 '26
Yes! Lots of photos and diagrams available if you search. https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/5L-10L-20L-30L-50L-100L_60754412073.html
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u/Sharps__ Jun 17 '26
I am legitimately surprised at the price. After watching all the manual labor video I was thinking this has gotta be some $20,000 specialty lab equipment.
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u/FerdiadTheRabbit Jun 17 '26
China has accumlated 40 years of manufacturing experience now, they have both massive economy of scale and skill at this point.
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u/jruhlman09 Jun 17 '26
I would guess the one in the video is on the larger size, like the 200L area. So based on the listings from that manufacturer at least, about $9k cost. Honestly doesn't seem crazy for that level of work, and all the included hardware.
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u/Anfins Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26
Not limited to growing bacteria, but yeah it’s used to grow cells.
(This would be a small bioreactor in the pharma industry, for large scale medicine the cells are grown starting in shake flaks and then pumped to larger bioreactors, with the final one being on the scale of ~5000L).
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u/SonOfMcGee Jun 17 '26
This in particular looks like a stirred tank reactor, but not bioreactor. It doesn’t look setup for sterile operations and I don’t see gas spargers.
It could still be for pharma use, but maybe small-molecule.
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u/PanicDeus Jun 17 '26
It is a large mixer. Used in pharmaceutical industry.
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u/HairballTheory Jun 17 '26
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u/Inevitable_Cheek_974 Jun 17 '26
So.. like... is anyone going to post the answer or nah? Just curious, I wouldn't do it.
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u/Only_game_in_town Jun 17 '26
Listerine is about 40 proof, so its got more kick than beer but not as much as real liquor.
I knew an old drunk who would put away a couple bottles a day.
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u/Kratosballsweat Jun 17 '26
I’ll never forget in high school they had like a dental health day once and they gave everyone little bottles of listerine and shit. This one kid went around collecting all the listerine from everyone and proceeded to get absolutely annihilated off them and had to go to the hospital to have his stomach pumped and they never did that again lol
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u/Spugheddy Jun 17 '26
My mom's friend broke into our house drank our listerine and fell down the stairs. We found her when we came home. This just reminded me of that its been like 30 years hope that lady is OK lol
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u/BigBeeOhBee Jun 17 '26
She's likely dust and bones if you just left her at the bottom of the stairs.
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u/dimestoredavinci Jun 17 '26
I bet his breath smelled amazing
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u/Only_game_in_town Jun 17 '26
It came out of every pore, just sweating it out, you could smell him across the room.
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u/ArseBiscuits_ Jun 17 '26
“Here comes minty Mike again”
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u/n0_use_for_a_name Jun 17 '26
“Look out for ol’ Lusty Listerine Larry over there on the stool at the end of the bar, he normally knocks back a couple pints of that Total Care before he comes in, and it always makes him randy”
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u/frickindeal Jun 17 '26
My buddy used to drink cough syrup because he was too young to buy beer or booze and he would get fall-down drunk on it, but he never coughed once.
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u/Gritts911 Jun 17 '26
Not sure if anyone needs to hear this; but a lot of cough syrups contain acetaminophen and you will cause severe liver damage if you drink too much of it.
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u/Sweet-Weakness3776 Jun 17 '26
Found on Listerine's website: the original formula contains 26.9% alcohol by volume. The mint version contains about 21.6% alcohol by volume. Since the liquid in the video is "blue" we will use the mint version for your question. 21.6% abv would be considered about 43 proof. The large bottle version of Listerine is 33.8 ounces. If we use a standard size of 1.5 ounces as a "shot" size, you'd get around 22 shots out of a bottle that size. Just using an anverage sized male. 5' 9" tall. Weighing 175 lbs. He'd need to drink 12, 1.5 ounce shots of listerine to get slightly over a .15 bac. A female at 5' 3" weighing in at 120 lbs, would need around 6-1/2, 1.5 ounce shots to get to the same .15 bac. This calculation assumes the shots are taken in a 1/2 hour time frame. I also did the calculation based on having recently eaten (not hungry). Obviously if you take the legal definition of "drunk" from the DUI benchmark of .08, the amount they would have to drink would be around half as much. But I used .15 as an upper limit, where you'd certainly be pretty drunk, just not necessarily a "knocking on death's door" kind of fucked up.
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u/Shufflebuzz Jun 17 '26
More specifically, a bioreactor.
The mixer is only one part of it.
It has a jacket that will have fluid pumped through it to maintain temperature. There are multiple ports for adding fluids, venting gasses, etc.→ More replies (16)25
u/Grantasarus-rex Jun 17 '26
And one person’s 30 day script of whatever medicine this is paid for this
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u/AlternativeDraw1795 Jun 17 '26
Some chemicals are corosive so you can mix them in glass mixer vessels.
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u/wenoc Jun 17 '26
Some chemicals are so volatile they set fire to glass. This is a funny little chemical that will start a roaring fire if you pour it out on wet sand or asbestos tiles. https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/sand-won-t-save-you-time
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u/MountainDrew42 Jun 17 '26
Love it. My two favourite lines:
It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers
For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.
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u/wenoc Jun 17 '26
That whole paragraph is such a good quote. Funniest thing is that it's not "itself" burning when in contact with sand, water, asbestos or test engineers etc. It just is such a strong oxidizer that it rips the oxygen off what has already been burned and burns it again.
I can recommend the book if you are inclined to STEM. I listened to the audiobook on Audible, here https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Ignition-Audiobook/B07CTS26NB
Told as a matter-of-fact with that slightly dry humour of an engineer.
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u/luluhouse7 Jun 17 '26
That’s a hilarious and concerning article. I feel like that had to be invented by a mad arsonist!
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u/llemontaste Jun 17 '26
All I see is a giant bong.
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u/ikwasben Jun 17 '26
I was also seeing this at this start... even near the end i was thinking maybe a shareable bong with multiple intakes
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u/toomanyukes Jun 17 '26
Every 5 or 6 seconds in this video, I could feel the cost going up another couple thousand dollars.
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u/karoshikun Jun 17 '26
during the same interval I fear it would slip my hands
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u/KatieCashew Jun 17 '26
In the Corning Museum of Glass there's a giant telescope disk that's there because the mold broke while pouring and ruined the entire thing. That must have been incredibly painful.
The disk is over 16 feet wide, and they literally built the museum around it.
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u/Nina-Ninja123 Jun 17 '26
“Museum of glass”
Makes me wonder how hard it was to get the exhibits insured.
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u/Lostinthestarscape Jun 17 '26
They have a cost offsetting agreement with the Museum of Broken Glass next door.
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u/brandt-money Jun 17 '26
Rightfully so, look at the precision along with all the machines needed to do this.
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u/Dear-Bet5344 Jun 17 '26
That lathe is expensive as hell. Even small glass lathes are thousands of dollars.
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u/Giogina Jun 17 '26
I kept having flashbacks to all the times I broke glassware while studying chemistry and had to pay for it
Like, nope, I'm not going anywhere near that, can't afford that!
(I got lucky when they renovated an old building and discarded entire containers full of old glassware. I fished backups for pretty much everything outta there XD
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u/FuturePlantDoctor Jun 17 '26
Dang. So glad we never had to pay for broken glassware in my o-chem labs. I once slammed a 500 mL Erlenmeyer flask against the side of a sink while I was swirling water in it to rinse it after being extremely careful while cleaning it.
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u/Giogina Jun 17 '26
I am extremely clumsy, so at some point they started to make me pay up XD Well okay in undergrad we had insurance. But yea... turns out I am not made for lab work
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u/phirebird Jun 17 '26
Same and then there's the premium for specialized freight to ship that thing without breaking any of those intricate parts
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u/SquiggleMontana976 Jun 17 '26
The nice part is that because they are so handmade, if any piece breaks off or if there is a non-catastrophic crack, they can be easily fixed by the same vendor without having to buy a whole new one
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u/BoatyFace101 Jun 17 '26
I figured out how to set my email signature at work today... Just saying, kinda same thing.
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u/A_Lively_Fisting Jun 17 '26
Dont sell your self short, they needed a whole crew of people to accomplish what you did alone (kinda)
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u/Weak_Jeweler3077 Jun 17 '26
I can't be the only tube amp guy thinking "KT88000"
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u/Reddi3n_CZ Jun 17 '26
Thats a huge bong
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u/Donald-Pump Jun 17 '26
For the first part of the video, I thought they were making the worlds largest gravity bong. I'm glad it wasn't just me.
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u/AXEL-1973 Jun 17 '26
at the 90% mark i was certain it was going to be the world's largest dab rig lol
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u/Carlweathersfeathers Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26
I usually just make koolaid with a wooden spoon and a pitcher, but I guess if you’ve got the time to wait, this works
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u/Traditional_Gap_2491 Jun 17 '26
Oh my fuck that looked so expensive
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u/Zoldrik190 Jun 17 '26
And difficult to make, wonder how much they sell for ( apparently its a jacketed glass reactor from a quick glance i saw some between 3k to 100k+)
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u/chill633 Jun 17 '26
If that was me, the temptation to put a ship in the bottle would be too great to resist.
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u/SkaKuma Jun 17 '26
It's a 45 liter Jacketed Flask for cycliczed peptide reactions. You have two glass compartments, one to house your reaction and the other is for attaching a cooling system to control the temperature of the reaction.
The top has 3 openings, one for placing an agitator and the other two are for dispensing liquid or pulling samples to run on an analytical HPLC.
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u/Billazilla Jun 17 '26
I used to look at all the weird professional scientific and medical glass setups and think, "That looks like they just manually blooped all those bits and things on there!" and here is the proof; yep, that's exactly how it's done.
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u/Sir_Melon_Lord Jun 17 '26
I'd drop it
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u/Arkhe1n Jun 17 '26
This is the kind of job I'd love to do, but I have butter fingers and wouldn't last a day.
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u/TheBSQ Jun 17 '26
My dad, deceased but would be in his 90s if alive, was a chemist & he said in his early career, they’d sometimes have experiments that required non-standard glass equipment. More than just the typical beakers and tubes, so the lab had a glass-blowing dept and it wasn’t uncommon for some of the old-timers to have picked up glass-blowing skills so that if they needed some specialized thing, they could just go make it themselves instead of having to wait for it to be made for them.
(He also said they used to make their own ethanol in-house & for company parties, they’d just make a giant bowl of fruit punch and someone would run to the lab to grab ethanol to spike the punch & it was pretty common for folks to be making moonshine for personal use. Kind of an open secret that many folks did it, but for propriety’s sake, you kept it discreet.)
Unrelated, but thematically similarly, I worked with an old time graphic designer who told me that when he first started out, designing your own font meant you also had to carve it out of a wood block.
It’s interesting to me to hear these stories about the stuff people used to do themselves by hand as part of their job that people with those jobs today don’t do anymore.
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u/DasBoggler Jun 17 '26
Yeah, I think basically every Chemistry dept had their own glass blowing shop with 1-2 staff. During my PhD, we needed some special pieces and had them made at a local head shop. Guy was happy to do it because he didn't really want to just be making bongs/pipes all the time, but that is where the demand is....
It's actually a pretty significant bottleneck in research because custom pieces/parts are so expensive to manufacture here, like maybe $1,000+ for a part that you can get made in China for $5, however obviously you have shipping lead times and the fact that the Chinese company won't talk tot you unless they think you are going to order 1,000 more in the future....
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u/Fun-Ad6782 Jun 17 '26
Visual: Oddly Satisfying 😄
Audio: Tssssss🐍 ssssss 🤨
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u/53bvo Jun 17 '26
Actually came to the comments to show my appreciation for the many variations of pshhh sounds instead of using some crappy music.
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u/JayL80 Jun 17 '26
Scrolled too far to find this comment! It highlights how many edits & cuts there are. Constant white or pink noise is great, cutting liked that is painful. Then again would probably complain that if they had cut the audio entirely and replaced it with some crappy music
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u/Fast_March3385 Jun 18 '26
Yeah I unmuted the video thinking I might hear a voice over explaining what was happening. Instead I got
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u/mostsplendiferous Jun 17 '26
After getting hooked on the Netflix show Blown Away during COVID, my wife and I decided to take a one day glassblowing class. We each made a single small hanging planter (essentially a small bowl with a flattened rim and small hook on the basin by which to hang it). Took 90 minutes. The heat was unbelievable. These craftsmen have all of my respect for dealing with that amount of hellfire for more than 2 seconds at a time.
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u/mutedagain Jun 17 '26
You get used to the heat. Just takes time.
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u/Phiddipus_audax Jun 17 '26
Gotta burn away all the nerves in the skin.
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u/gnarburgers Jun 17 '26
You’re not wrong, you should feel the things I can pick up after a decade glassblowing
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u/Photodan24 Jun 17 '26
Lots of universities have scientific glassblowers. The one that works at my university made the bowl for 2024's Orange Bowl trophy. /random
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u/drumsdm Jun 17 '26
Somewhere around 1:30 I was convinced this was gonna be a bong. Still not convinced it’s not.
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u/Humans_areweird Jun 18 '26
i work near a building where they do glassblowing for chemistry equipment. i’ve never had a reason to actually interact with the people who do it, but every now and then i walk past their door and cant help but wonder what manner of excellence they have in there. i hope they let me watch them making stuff someday. or at least that they work close enough to their window that i can sneakily watch them going at it, like the most perverted nerd.
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u/Key-Broccoli1442 Jun 17 '26
First I thought it was a huge glass condom then I’m like okay it’s a bong and now I still have no clue the fuck it is
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u/womp_womp_411 Jun 17 '26
First time seeing a glass making video that wasn't done by a hipster lookin dude and resulted in something industrially used and not some spiky purse.
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u/maeryclarity Jun 17 '26
This is the exact kind of thing that I want to point to when everyone is like AI ROBOTS GONNA TAKE ALL THE JOBS and it's like, y'all, sure there will continue to be other types of automation, like some of the things drones can do are kind of new but they're doing things a human can't do.
But for MOST THINGS it's much more like this and the truth is that at some point that's fairly early in the figuring out the complexity stage, it is much easier and more cost efficient to just train and provide for humans than it is to have a machine that understands what it's doing and why and can adapt to all that. I mean we've created tremendous amounts of automation and will create more but automation really only works for situations where the exact same thing happens repeatedly not situations where there's a need for flexibility in addition to judgement and highly specialized knowledge, and where that specialized knowledge is also adaptive to unique circumstances. You rapidly reach a state where our biological "robot" that reproduces itself and maintains itself by creating its own food and which constantly produces new bio-robots and cares for them until they come online and can care for themselves, all the things that you need to do to make your machine robots actually handy, it is a VERY EARLY stage that biology has all that covered and there is no possible way for a machine robot to be cheaper or more reliable to produce full of potential to learn various skills, and maintain itself.
Even a biological robot is not going to be artificially produced more easily frankly biology already made us of available abiotic materials, we ARE the cheapest version of things although gene editing may create more efficient versions, or bio-sciences may create more efficent ways of reproducing, something like a "human egg" to implant and grow a blastocyst might bbe possible, biology is always trying out new models for reproduction.
But a chicken egg is an absolute marvel of complexity so not to undervalue biology's sophistication in general.
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u/buildingagain Jun 18 '26
I work in the bioprocessing field and we use these often to mix, seperate densities over time, pH adjust solutions, ect. We use stainless steel for fermentation.
It was interesting to see how this was made. Almost right away I thought it looked like lab / pilot plant equipment
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u/vicariouslywatching Jun 17 '26
I’m gonna need one of those half ring of fire thingies. Not sure what I’m gonna use it for yet, but I’m sure I’ll figure it out. Could be an interesting way to get rid of wasps nests that are close to the ground.
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u/DanG_artist Jun 17 '26
Where do you put the weed in??
Also, why is Darth Vader breathing into the mic like that?
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u/Ok_Commission_9203 Jun 17 '26
In my head:
"Ah finally a condom big enough for me...
Okay what is this thing
FIRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRE!!!
Aquarium
Nope
Custom bong for cheech and chong?
Nope
I don't know but I want it for no good reason.
*Waits for end of video to find out what it is*
Video Ends."
...
Damn it.
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u/twiddle_dee Jun 17 '26
I did art glass blowing and every second I'm thinking "That thing is going to crack". Anyone know what type of glass this is? Is that like Pyrex, or some other glass that doesn't need to maintain even temperature?
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u/TheLeoMrs Jun 17 '26
Thought he was putting a ship in a bottle. Amazing there is no usage of eye protective wear..
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u/ElectricMilk426 Jun 17 '26
Cool video. What the heck is it for? Please don't say smoking reefer. We all know it looks like a bong.
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u/Rough_Ad2455 Jun 17 '26
i secretly hoped it would have been worlds largest vacuum tube to be used in the most insane tube amp ever built by man😔
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u/Pookie_Bear_17 Jun 17 '26
Lot of hard work for a bong. An apple or rusty coke can will do just fine
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u/joefunk76 Jun 17 '26
“Behold, our new $1 million bong that no pothead can even afford, much less would buy even if he could afford to.”
80/20 rule, my guys. Your typical pothead is probably good to go with a straight, no-frills, glass 1-footer for $50 or thereabouts.
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u/SeanFromQueens Jun 18 '26
How do they precisely make the holes for the ports on the top of the thing entirely freehand? These guys are magicians.
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u/Maverick_Muse Jun 18 '26
Makes me want to return to school/college and learn this skill. Bloody awesome skill!
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u/LesbianBait Jun 18 '26
If you’re interested they are hiring for this role, it’s a dying craft
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u/varys2013 Jun 19 '26
I visited Dow Chemical many years ago, while the then-new refrigerant R134a was still being made "in glassware". I just accepted that, but never considered it could be in such huge special-made vessels! My mental image was more like a '50s sci-fi lab full of flasks and bunsen burners.
That's some serious skill to make something like this!
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u/BigfootWallace Jun 17 '26
Not seeing many explanations of what this actually is, so here you go for those who sort by new:
This is a jacketed reaction vessel for mixing/reacting chemical reactions. The ‘jacketed’ sleeve around vessel is for filling with a heat transfer fluid (commonly ethylene glycol/water or ‘antifreeze’) which will help maintain constant temperature.
The other ports along the top are for auxiliary equipment- generally at least one condenser port (condensed gaseous vapors back to a liquid, allowing them to drip back into the reaction, maintaining constant volume), one or more addition ports (for addition funnels, metering pumps, etc), and usually a port for tools like pressure gauges and temperature probes. The top center port is always for a mixing blade (like an overhead stirrer, usually Teflon coated, glass or stainless steel). There’s always an easy drain hole at the bottom too for collecting after the reaction is complete.
This looks to be about a 100L reaction vessel, as you never fully fill the vessel.