Lapped and Un-lapped Micro-Fine Stones at 800x

[Mark76]

I started with the 100# stones in order to efficiently flatten the ceramics and then progressed up through the grits to smooth the surface, ending with a 3 micron bench stone that yields a very smooth surface.

Clay, I suspect many of us can go to 1000 grit diamonds for lapping. Would it be of any use to lap the micro fine ceramics against other ceramic stones for further refinement? Or would this have hardly any effect, since the lapping material is exactly as hard as the stone you want to lap?

Molecule Polishing: my blog about sharpening with the Wicked Edge

[wickededge]

I started with the 100# stones in order to efficiently flatten the ceramics and then progressed up through the grits to smooth the surface, ending with a 3 micron bench stone that yields a very smooth surface.

Clay, I suspect many of us can go to 1000 grit diamonds for lapping. Would it be of any use to lap the micro fine ceramics against other ceramic stones for further refinement? Or would this have hardly any effect, since the lapping material is exactly as hard as the stone you want to lap?[/quote]

I think the surface finish you’ll get with the 1000# diamonds is probably more than sufficient. Rubbing the stones together afterward should work well to give a final smoothing to the surface.

-Clay

[Anthony Yan]

I added a scale to the last image as requested earlier by Lagrangian:

Zoom

[EDIT (8/25/2012): Clay says he may have used the wrong length-scale for this image. See Clay’s update post(s) and my follow-up after this post (in this thread) for the corrected image(s) and number(s).]

Thanks Clay! Very interesting. 🙂

By my measurements, that 100 micron line is 476 pixels wide and 186 pixels tall.
Using the Pythagorean Theorem, I get that the line is about 511 pixels long.

So there are about 5 pixels per micron.

The wavelength of visible light is 0.38 to 0.74 microns.
So the wavelength of light is around 2 to 4 pixels! 😀

Sincerely,
–Lagrangian

P.S. Theoretically, the best possible resolution for an optical microscopes is around half a wavelength, which is approximately 0.2 microns. See Nikon’s microscopy website for details.
http://www.microscopyu.com/articles/optics/index.html

P.P.S. Clay, if your camera can take pictures which are uncompressed (such as RAW, TIFF, or PNG), then I would be quite curious to examine one or two uncompressed images.

[wickededge]

Lagrangian,

I think I did the last scale incorrectly. Here is another, uncompressed TIFF with the scale added using a much simpler and more accurate method: Uncompressed Image It’s still been shrunken by Blogger. If you send me your email address, I can send you the full image via dropbox or something similar – it’s over 28 MB in size.

-Clay

[Anthony Yan]

Hi Clay,

Thanks! I sent you a private message with my e-mail. 🙂

Sincerely,
–Lagrangian

[Anthony Yan]

Hi Clay,

Thanks for the updated and uncompressed image. 🙂
I measured the 20 micron line to be 216 pixels long.

So a micron is about 10.8 pixels in length.

So the wavelengths of visible light (0.38 – 0.74 microns) would be 4 to 8 pixels.

The highest theoretical resolution for an optical microscope is about 1/2 wavelength, or 0.2 microns, which is around 2 pixels. Of course, most microscopes don’t have such a high resolution in practice, but some get close.

Pretty neat! 😀

Sincerely,
–Lagrangian

P.S. For the .jpg that Clay posted above, the 20 micron bar is about 97 pixels wide. So the pixel measurements are approximately one half the numbers above.

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