Plaster & Cement Spatula, Rigid — 17 cm, One-Piece Stainless Steel — One-piece 17 cm stainless steel spatula with a full-length stiffening rib — no handle join

This is the all-metal member of the rigid spatula range. Where 1816-14 uses a wooden handle fitted with a ferrule, 1816-16 is forged and finished as a single piece of stainless steel — blade, waist and handle in one continuous body, with no join anywhere along its length. That construction is the reason to specify it. A ferrule joint is the one place on a mixing spatula where plaster slurry, alginate and investment can creep in, set hard and resist cleaning; over repeated autoclave cycles a wooden handle also dries, darkens and eventually loosens on the tang. A one-piece instrument has none of those failure points. It washes down in an ultrasonic bath, goes through unlimited steam cycles without degradation, and can be left soaking without concern — which matters in labs running high plaster throughput and in any setting under strict reprocessing protocols. Rigidity comes from a raised rib swaged along the centre of the body, visible in the product images running from the handle end up into the blade. The rib acts as a spine: it stiffens a relatively thin sheet of steel so the blade transmits force into thick mixes without flexing, while keeping the overall instrument light and well balanced. The waisted mid-section gives the fingers a natural place to sit, and the ends are broad rounded paddles with smooth unsharpened edges — the wide end for spreading, flattening and lifting a mix off a slab, the narrower end for working into a bowl and scraping it clean. At 17 cm this is the shortest of the straight rigid spatulas in the range, favoured for controlled work on a glass slab, smaller mixing bowls, and bench work where a 19–20 cm instrument is unwieldy. As with the rest of the range it carries across into pharmacy compounding — mixing ointments and creams, working powders, handling tablets — where the seamless all-steel body is a genuine advantage for cleaning.