The Trachway video light intubating stylet has been commercially available for clinical use since 2010. It was designed by Biotronic Instrument Enterprise Company Limited (Taichung, Taiwan). Owing to its withdrawal from the market because of intubation, the Trachlight was replaced by the Trachway video light intubating stylet for difficult intubation.1, 2 However, the original endotracheal tube holder was too loose to fix the endotracheal tube in place. Therefore, we designed a device to replace the holder.

The device is more practical and cheaper to produce than the original device (Fig. 1). We used a rubber spacer, which can be purchased from any hardware store, and cut the rubber spacer on one side (Fig. 2). The details of the rubber spacer are as follows: (1) the body thickness is 1.05 cm; (2) the upper border diameter is 1.5 cm and the lower border is 1.75 cm; (3) the inner hole diameter is 0.38 cm and the outer hole diameter is 0.43 cm.

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Fig. 1. The original tube holder. “A” is the inner hole and “B” is the tail diameter.

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Fig. 2. Our custom-made rubber spacer device. The body thickness is 1.05 cm, the upper border diameter is 1.5 cm, and the lower border diameter is 1.75 cm. The inner hole diameter is 0.38 cm and the outer hole diameter is 0.43 cm.

Our device for the endotracheal tube provides a better fixation than the original device (Fig. 3) because the original device’s inner hole diameter is 0.4 cm and the outer hole diameter is 0.85 cm, and the tail diameter is 1.25 cm (which is 0.15 cm larger than the endotracheal tube adapter). Furthermore, the one-piece rubber spacer costs less than 10 Taiwan dollars (NTD 38/4 piece/pack). We nicknamed the holder “the 10-dollar kid.”

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Fig. 3. Detail of the endotracheal tube fixation with the two devices. “C” is the endotracheal tube.