Building a plankton net with common materials

bromodomain · Post by **bromodomain** » Mon Aug 12, 2013 3:19 am

I've been interested in assembling a plankton net for quite some time and most of the materials required are quite trivial. As you can imagine the actual mesh cloth is the most difficult to obtain.

I looked online and found such mesh cloth for sale, specifically designed for plankton nets. As one can expect the price is inversely proportional to the pore size and so 10 µm mesh costs about 140$ (http://www.wildco.com/Nitex_Bolting_Cloth.html)

Has anyone managed to build a net using cheaper/easier to find mesh cloths?

Planapo · Post by **Planapo** » Mon Aug 12, 2013 9:54 am

Mesh size to be chosen depends on the organisms that one intends to catch. 10 µm mesh size is very small, only used for nanoplankton nets. A common plankton net gauze size 'Nr. 8' that we use for microplankton, has a mesh width of around 180 to 200 µm.

The fabric used for screen printing is said to work.
Have a look at ebay 320789134156, for example.

--Betty

bromodomain · Post by **bromodomain** » Mon Aug 12, 2013 4:13 pm

Thanks for the link. I am indeed interested in the tiniest critters that lurk in ponds and rivers. If you had a few cloths of varying pore size you could fractionate the organisms according to size and thus have nicely sorted study material.

yvan_be · Post by **yvan_be** » Sun Dec 15, 2013 12:15 am

Planapo is right: mesh for screen printing is usable. Actualy it's the same fabric used for both aplications. If you know a screen printer or a screen printing factory, leftovers from remeshing their printing frames are possibly for free.

Brand names are for example: Monyl or Monolen.

These meshes are produced with all sorts of mesh sizes.

Screen printing fabric is defined by the mesh count, meaning: # treads/inch or treads/cm and the tread thickness (S for small, T for medium,or HD for coarse). Most used nowadays is the monofilament fabric.

Screen printing fabric is availlable in any mesh count between 16 mesh and 400 mesh (US, meaning: treads/inch).

As a general guideline, these aproximate mesh sizes can be expected for an average monofilament T screen printing fabric:

Mesh (US): mesh size

80: 177µm * 177µm
120: 125µm* 12µm
140: 105µm * 105µm
200: 74µm * 74µm
230: 63µm * 63µm
270: 53µm * 53µm
400: 38µm * 38µm.