
First, what the heck are we even doing? Well, we're gonna pull a glass needle, fill it with salt solution, stick it on a plastic holder with a wire inside, maneuver it to a cell, apply a little suction, and let the magic of "seal formation" occur. Next, assuming we're doing whole cell voltage clamp, we break the seal membrane with more suction, gaining control of the voltage across the cells' remaining membrane, while recording the current (also filling the cell with our pipette solution). Sheesh, when you distill it down to two sentences, it pretty much trivializes what I spent years learning and do everyday.
The opening of the pipette tip will be ~1 µm, while the cell is on the order of ~10 µm. Obviously, if the pipette tip is too big, then we'll just suck up the entire cell. Not good. But, as the pipette tip gets smaller, the resistance between the pipette interior and the cell interior gets larger. Also not good. In fact, that causes a whole host of problems that are left as an exercise for the reader to derive (ok, just kidding. There's a series of posts reserved for this, with current working title: "Dr. RseriesLove, or, How I learned to stop worrying and love the fact that my currents are all wrong)

Then I smooth the ends of the capillary glass with a bunsen burner flame, because jagged end (even how it comes from the factory) will scrape off the silver chloride on the wire that transmits the current from the ions in solution to the electrons in the amplifier circuitry (as well as tearing up the O-ring in the headstage holder).
Then we move onto the puller itself. There are many different kinds of pullers, but having been in a number of electrop
Here's the puller, a P-97, and if you unscrewed the 5 screws on the font panel, you could peer in and see the brushless super quiet 92 mm fan we installed (way in the back of course, a real pain in arse to reach). The smoked plexiglass cover opens to reveal:


If you look closely, the tip of the pipette is wrapped with a thin strip of Parafilm. This helps reduce the capacitance of the pipette, but isn't nearly as time consuming or messy as using Sylgard. A requirement for setting the series resistance compensation. All of which are good topics for future posts!
Hope this was at least mildly useful to some people out there, and marginally enjoyable to others. If anything's not clear, just fire up the comments and lemme know.