END CALIBRATION CANNOT BE PERFORMED

[khamid1963]

Hello All

I sent a pipette for calibration by the vendor. The vendor found that the pipette is not functional and cannot be calibrated?
Now we need to open an investigation. Is it necessary to go back and review data since the last calibration? There was no calibration failure.
Can we justify not reviewing previous data?

 

[dwperron]

It is always troubling when a lab gets a non-functional piece of equipment for calibration. I have a hard time believing that so many items that were working perfectly suddenly break on the way to the cal lab.....
Since you have no as-found data to deal with, you have a couple of choices:
* Take the easy way out and declare that you didn't get data so you can't make a determination.
* Try to determine some of the last things the pipette had last been used on and see if you can validate the results.

 

[Ron Rompen]

dwperron has an excellent suggestion. if you aren't able to provide 'as found' information from the calibration lab, then you have no evidence that the pipette was functioning properly.
you need to retest some parts using a pipette (or other type of gauge) which IS working, to validate that the parts which were checked by the suspect pipette are actually within specification.