MicrobeHunter.com Microscopy Forum

My source of chemicals (Magnacol UK) has stopped shipping internationally. Could anyone advise me where to buy paraffin embedding wax suitable for microtoming in Continental Europe, OR provide a recipe for to make it from raw paraffin?

https://shop.es-drei.de/laborhilfsmitte ... uettfaehig

https://www.laboratoriumdiscounter.nl/d ... gramm.html

You will find several offers on Ebay as well.

Just to name some.

Thanks, Alexander, but these offers are about pure paraffin, which I had no trouble finding indeed. Paraffin embedding wax is not pure paraffin, but has additions to facilitate harmonica ribbon formation (e.g. natural rubber, as I came to understand recently). I do not have experience with the embedding wax kind, but I am about to try my microtome first time and I 'd like unnecessary obstacles avoided.

The expensive microtome paraffin has typically some DMSO mixed by. DMSO is readily available. A more classic way is to mix some bee wax to the paraffin.

In the past, I have used pure paraffin and obtained ribbon sections with a rotary microtome. It may be a little more finicky, but certainly doable for a lot of samples (my class in uni all used it instead of Paraplast)
Also, without DMSO and the other additives, I was much more comfortable using it (some researchers I have worked with prefer it because of health/safety).
If I were you, I would try using it as a dry run, its cheap enough and may work for what you need.
Sorry, I have no knowledge of Paraplast or other distributors in Europe.