The best option by far is to buy the pads or membranes precut to the sizes you need for best consistency. Common nitrocellulose width is 25 mm and conjugate pad is 10 mm. The sample pad and absorbent pad widths are dependent on how long your overall strip is, how much sample is running on the strip, and how much overlap you need.

Now to answer your question specifically, we used a guillotine paper cutter with an adjustable stop (the style where you push the paper under the knife guide until it touches the stop). We would use calipers to set the stop precisely where we needed it and then marked it with a marker. Put your sheet of membrane in, push it under the knife until the stop, and then cut it. Measure your first cut and verify it's good.

Guillotine cutters like this were still very expensive.

Josh Lizer, thank you!!

Yes, NC membranes will be precut by the manufacturers, but all conjugate/sample/top pads in all LFA material kits available on market are in A4 size. so, we need to cut them.

I just ordered a guillotine paper cutter. hope it will work.

Such a question, please: do you think it is fine to use a guillotine paper cutter to cut uncut sheets (backing cards with assembled pads and membranes)?

THANK YOU!!!

You can buy precut conjugate pads from Alhstrom at 10 mm. Our absorbent pads and sample pads were precut as a custom operation by the manufacturer. They're cheapest to purchase in pre-cut rolls.

I would not recommend cutting an assembled card with the guillotine cutter, the reason being is this needs an extremely sharp edge, because the cutting action can actually crush the nitrocellulose membrane along the edges and cause flow or performance issues while running. You'll see poor gold migration or incomplete formation of the test or control line across the entire width of the strip. The other reason is that you get poor consistency of strip width, and it is important to have all the strips exactly the same width when cut.

The other thing that will happen when cutting assembled cards in the guillotine cutter is it tends to pull off pads like absorbent pad or sample pad. I have cut strips before in a guillotine cutter if there was a piece of a card left and I was one strip short to set up an experiment, knowing I could salvage one or two more strips from the end of the card.

But for cutting cards into strips I recommend a cutter designed for the purpose, such as the Biodot CM5000.

Lateral flow is an extremely fickle technology. The more simple the technology, the harder the science. It is important to have the right equipment to make the tests because lateral flow chemistry is complex enough even with ideal equipment. At minimum you need a sprayer, like a Biodot XYZ3060 or equivalent (cost about $60k), a cutter ($20-30k), and a laminator such as a Kinematic Matrix 2210 (around $10-20k if my memory serves).

Josh Lizer, thank you for the explanation!

Don't you know if Ahlstrom sells kind of starter kits (with set of many different conjugate/sample/wick pads)?

I cant find something like this on their website.

Please contact me at [email protected] we will provide you free sample for experiment trial.