Too close for comfort

A helpful colleague very kindly let me try something on her centrifuge today, and she was taking a bit of a risk as we didn't really know how it would behave. Once we took these sample tubes out we saw cracks in the plastic - if they had gone all the way through and released the flammable solvent we would have had trouble.

I managed to scrape some tarry stuff out of the bottom, which dried quickly and gave me a sample of the solid I was after. Kind of last minute, as today was my last day in work for a while.