Some homemade micrographs

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kel_aa

Joined
Oct 1, 2004
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These are done with a digital camera and a 30x lighted microscope on some of my knives in their various states of use. To relate the scale, the black lines are mm marks. On my monitor they are about 90 mm apart, so I would say the magnification is about 90x. The level of detail is not that high. I would say the resolution is about 10 um (10 microns, 0.01 mm). Grain examination can be made starting with about 100x (which is only about 11% bigger than this). The resolution here probably falls far short, and plus the pieces must be polished and etched.



I wouldn't worry too much about coloration between the pictures, the coloration within the pictures have to do with the way they are reflecting the light. A reflective line at the edge on one side generally indicates a burr. It is generally a useful tool to confirm very small burrs, and to check for edge quality.

An shot of ATS-34 AFCK showing some deep fractures/dents:


The same blade on a different spot. I think the spots are carbides (at least at the edge) as I haven't used anything coarser than Spyderco medium stones on it for a while:


A SAK with a fairly clean edge:


A SAK with a burred edge. The burr reflects light on one side:


A factory edge serrated S30V Native on the straight portion. I am not sure if they are carbides or just a coarse finish, but I would call that fairly toothy in comparison to the other edges:


This is a carbon lam Mora that I have been reprofiling with a coarse stone:


An Opinel with a some edge deformation on the left:

http://www.tachypic.com/view/1987
 
An Aus8 Kershaw Antelope Hunter with a burred edge. The reflective side is the one that the burr is on:


A Schrade fixed blade with unknown steel. This actually has a clean edge despite being quickly done to use on yard work. It does have some chunks missing like the AFCK in some spots.
 
My Native looks the same way as yours under 60X on my lighted microscope, Spyderco definately leaves them toothy. They do still push cut very well, though.
 
I checked the page source and saw the links are for tachypic.com, which is apparently down.
 
Nice work, some of the pictures are very dark which can be adusted readily in photoshop or similar, something which is a severe problem with a lot of the pictures I have taken in the past.

-Cliff
 
For photos that I want a thumbnail to I use tachypic.com, otherwise I host with picturehosting.org. Their servers are not 100% reliable. I don't know if they are philanthropic projects or are just waiting to hit big like youtube as they are not very commerical. The upload activity for tachypic is very low, less than 2000 to date.

I brightened some of the pictures as suggested. I would also be interested in any ideas to increase performance of the setup. If you take the resolution of as 0.1 mm without the microscope, it really only works out to be about a 10x increase with a "30x" scope.

I think 0.1 mm resolution is nearly attained in pictures like these:
 
That's a good job with the pics.

That Native is no surprise, really. I see that type of edge on many Spyderco's, Benchmades and several of my Kershaw's when bought. That is exactly why when I get knives home I put a new, finer edge on them.

Great pics! Thanks for sharing! If the urge hits you to post more, I'd love to see them.
 
The scale in this series is a little different from the above, so to re-establish:



This is the carbon lam Mora being taken from the (1) coarse stone to (2) 325 grit DMT to (3) Sharpmaker medium corner to (4) Sharpmaker medium flats to (5) Sharpmaker fine.


This is what some abrasives look like under magnification: (1) 325 grit DMT, (2) 600 grit wet/dry, (3) Sharpmaker medium, and (4) Sharpmaker fine.


I got my S30V Military and VG10 Caly Jr back. They weren't significantly used since I sharpened them 7 weeks ago. The Military showing the two major chips and a undamaged area:



And the Caly Jr:



It looks to me that the S30V Military is smooth while the VG10 show some pinpoint reflections at the edge (round teeth).

Here is a new razor blade and a silk pin:

 


This shows up about 16.5 cm on my monitor so that gives a resolution of about 2.5 microns

Here is a burr starting to fall off a flex-cut chip carving knife (grinding on a Shapton 15k waterstone on the reverse side)



Thought it was interesting the way it comes off in sections.
 
Nice work, kel_aa, can you see anything interesting looking directly into the edge and are they side symmetric.

yuzuha said:
Here is a burr starting to fall off a flex-cut chip carving knife (grinding on a Shapton 15k waterstone on the reverse side)
Click to expand...

What did it look like on the previous stone finish.

-Cliff
 
Kel aa, looks like you also have the microscope bug! Nice to know that I'm not the only crazy one around here ^-^. What are you using for a scope and camera? I'm using one of these http://www.microscopesusa.com/Vision.html (got it years ago for my mineral and fossil collection) and finally picked up the USB version of this http://www.microscopesusa.com/MiniVID.html , which seems to act like a 20x eyepiece so I get 20 & 60 optical magnification (or 40 & 120x with a doubler) plus whatever digital magnification you get from capturing it at 1280 x 1024 pixels (though the original snaps are over 3 meg so I've had to do a lot of compression to get them down to a reasonal 130k or so so they don't take forever to download and loose some image quality in the process). Lighting becomes a real problem at 120x, not to mention focus (the table I have it on is flimsy enough that all I have to do is touch the scope and the image jiggles, so I'm taking most of my stuff at 60x optical (which seems to be between 200 and 400x total? when comparing it to pics people have taken with the QX5.
Here is my composite shot of the 3 Spyderco Sharpmaker rods (with some swarf ^-^)
 
I'm using a Sony Cybershot W5 with 5mb and 3x optical zoom and a 30x lighted microscope ($9.99)from Radioshack/theSource:
sonyw5.jpg

30xmicroscope.jpg


I clamp/ rubberband them to a plank and hold the piece myself. I usually set the camera focus to 0.5m and adjust manually on the microscope.

When you say resolution of 2.5 microns do you mean the size of objects that can be resolved? I used the term resolution to roughly mean the minimum size of objects you can expect to see, that being about the 10 micron magnitude (objects which can be resolved). The pictures shown here are cropped to 25% because of the lack of fine detail in the first place. Your pictures are much more refined.

Yep, I got the microscope bug! My main desire is for others to be able to see what I am seeing (if they have the desire), and prehaps they will get inspired and share theirs to.

As for looking at the edge directly, I will try again. I don't think it was very fruitful when I tried before due to the lack of depth preception, meaning it only focuses to a specific distance.
 
yuzuha said:
Well, this was after my natural awase with Tsushima black nagura...
Click to expand...

Thanks for the details. What was the condition of the edge before sharpening. That entire black strip is just a fault line of weakened steel.

-Cliff
 
Cliff Stamp said:
Thanks for the details. What was the condition of the edge before sharpening. That entire black strip is just a fault line of weakened steel.

-Cliff
Click to expand...

Before I started, it had the factory edge with primary and micro bevel, though not as polished. Hard to tell in a 2d photo, but the fatigued steel sort of mushroomed over the edge like the crown on a well used cold chisel or rock drill, and folded into this neat little curl like a tiny plane shaving... you can see the curvature more clearly on the right side of the first photo where the long strip is just hanging on by a thread, and on the left where a bit of fuzz from the towel I patted it dry with got caught under the edge of it.
 
Nope, brand new, but then I ground the heck out of it for a series of pics of the surface finish left by a series of different waterstone and nagura combinations and turned it into a slightly convexed V grind in the process.
 
kel_aa said:
I'm using a Sony Cybershot W5 with 5mb and 3x optical zoom and a 30x lighted microscope ($9.99)from Radioshack/theSource

I clamp/ rubberband them to a plank and hold the piece myself. I usually set the camera focus to 0.5m and adjust manually on the microscope.

Yep, I got the microscope bug! My main desire is for others to be able to see what I am seeing (if they have the desire), and prehaps they will get inspired and share theirs to.

As for looking at the edge directly, I will try again. I don't think it was very fruitful when I tried before due to the lack of depth preception, meaning it only focuses to a specific distance.
Click to expand...
I just picked one up at the Shack, but they're 60-100X now, for the same $9.99. I looked at my Ritter and Lman Wave, which I had on me. Looked at the Wave edge-on, I was able to get decent focus and see it well enough.

I need a better camera if I want to get shots. I have a Kodak with a not so hot macro setting. Can you describe your setup a little more?

Oh, and this could be interesting to try, it converts 2D pictures to 3D
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dhoiem/projects/popup/index.html
 
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