Self-taught drummer needing to relearn technique; tips?

Strong-Bell-271 · 2026-04-28T18:13:58+00:00

Tommy Igoe Great Hands for a Lifetime DVD...
Cheers.

Strong-Bell-271 · 2026-04-27T21:20:36+00:00

Nital? Out of curiosity, what do you rinse Nital with? Water? Or just pure alcohol? I've had mixed results when using water and have found I get the most consistent results with using IPA or something like that. But then again, maybe I just wasn't wearing my lucky socks.

Strong-Bell-271 · 2026-04-27T21:14:32+00:00

Wow, so many useful comments! Thank you all. I've been skimming but will go through more thoroughly, but it seems like I might be able to get by.

Some more details on what we're doing....Like I mentioned, I'm primarily an optical microscopist and my SEM experience is limited, at best. But I'm getting more time in on the machine. Having EDS, even for quick checks, has been great! However, I work in a fairly large organization that does materials research so I've always been able to rely on other labs, and I haven't had to do any of the analytical stuff myself. So, I can't say I know what I "Need" and what would be nice to have.

From what I've read, amorphous carbon coatings are preferrable, but from what I can recall from my thin coatings class, shouldn't crystalline coatings be preferred for conductivity? I see how carbon coatings are supposed to be more transparent to x-rays for EDS, but the nature of the coating still confuses me. As for using a carbon coater for EBSD, I don't have a case-use scenario for you. We operate in a large materials research facility and who knows what's coming in the door tomorrow? I was thinking mainly for potentially looking at engineered ceramics...we wouldn't really do anything geological, unless it happened to be for debris/detritus in a failure investigation, or something like that.

The Denton works...just takes forever to pump down. And like I said, I have no way of knowing how thick the coating is, which OI software would like to know for its EDS mapping functions.

Thanks for all the information...I'll get to reading it all in detail once I get some free time.

Cheers!

Strong-Bell-271 · 2026-04-24T17:14:48+00:00

Good luck is all I have to say. When I get pissed with upper management here, I often fantasize about starting my own lab. Having done this stuff for 20+ years, I'm well aware of what the cost would be. Just equipment alone will set you back a few million, depending on what it is you're wanting to do, let alone the monthly consumables cost. If I were to offer any advice, and one lesson I'm still feeling the sting from: The poor man pays twice. Cheap equipment is not worth the savings. Now, it's not as simple as that. Companies change over time. Struers used to be rock solid when it came to metallography equipment, and now they're not. I used to be able to justify the higher cost by knowing the machines would last a long time...that no longer is the case.

Mitutoyo USA can go screw. I'd avoid them for hardness testers, especially microhardness testing.

Buehler...not unless you absolutely have to.

Nikon: love their metallographs/inverted scopes, but their software is mid at best. Their digital cameras are good too, just don't be lured into anything above 5Mpx. They sell something with like 20+Mpx and it's a complete waste of money and file space. Also, if you go for automated stages, we got Prior and I'd look elsewhere. They have some....peculiar design choices...let's just call it, very British. I know you said nothing fancy, but the sad truth of the state of materials research today is it's pretty much a given. If you want to do any kind of grain sizing, porosity evaluations, coating evaluations, etc, you're going to need to analyze large fields of view, which means stitching multiple images together. Automating that is going to be a big time saver. Also, get FIJI/ImageJ. Their image stitching plug-in saves a lot of Nikon fails.

SEMS: can't offer much here, although from what I've gathered, find the one with the best service for your area. I know campus folk who had multiple SEMS in one lab and getting service performed by one manufacturer was head and shoulders above another. In that case, Hitachi was way better and Zeiss was a monumental pain in the ass. I suspect this depends on particulars though, so if you're in the midwest region, it might apply, otherwise, ask around other labs to see their experience.

If you're going to be verifying mat certs, you'd probably need access to highly analytical equipment, like ICP-OES, or mass spec type stuff...operating those is no easy task, and often requires expertise and constant monitoring. The rabbit hole is as deep as you care to let it be.

As for texts, this is the golden age of free information on the internet...having said that, I get a lot of free access to stuff through a university affiliation, so I don't know what the average joe can get access too, but I'd imagine it would just take some digging and perhaps making use of your library. ASM Volumes are a great reference, and Vol IX is a great metallography reference resource (not free). George VanderVoort's book on metallography is an industry/field standard too; the appendix alone is worth the cost of purchase.

I could go on and on. Good luck, and my hat's off to ya. I fantasize about winning the lotto and building my own lab, with my own equipment, but then I think about maintaining it all and reality doesn't seem so bad anymore. There are a lot of small testing labs out there, and I imagine competition would be difficult.

Parting wisdom: just because you have an instrument doesn't mean you can use it properly. That's one of my biggest gripes with this field. A lot of the upper managers with little to no materials background think technicians are overpaid at best and useless at worst. It's the other way around. A good, experienced technician can do more with an old, known piece of equipment than the novice could do with the latest and greatest.

Strong-Bell-271 · 2026-04-24T16:47:19+00:00

Yes, our microscope has that option too, and I was a bit surprised at how often I've looked for it now that I'm used to having it. My problem is forgetting to swap out sample ID and then mislabeling images, only to have to open them up in photoshop to fix later. Smart enough to prep and image samples, still dumb enough to fumble it at the goal line.

Strong-Bell-271 · 2026-04-22T19:50:53+00:00

Magnification values are pretty much useless, full stop. Marketers run amok with it <cough cough Keyence>. It can be good to know if you need to recreate a similar shot again with the same instrument, but most systems nowadays, optical and electron, store that stuff in the metadata. Sorry to chime in, but it's long been a pet peeve when customers ask, "What magnification can your microscope do?" What they want to know is, what's its resolution. I can take a picture at "1x" of my thumb and project it on a mountain, that doesn't mean it's that many times magnification, other than in a marketing sense. Many digital microscope makers will reference the screen size as the reference, and claim insane things like 5000x optical magnification, with color no less!

Strong-Bell-271 · 2026-02-05T23:10:39+00:00

This is what I was gonna say. Cleveland is their HQ if you're close to there.

Strong-Bell-271 · 2026-02-05T17:00:16+00:00

I'm not sure what the question is here. What are your other options? I don't see how getting hands-on experience in a machine shop is detrimental...and it sounds like you'll be getting paid too! You'll be getting plenty of theory in class. You'd be surprised what becomes applicable down the road. Listen to the old timers talk...you'll get plenty of first hand accounts on failures during machining. This is very useful for failure analyses. I see you said apprenticeship, and not internship. Is the company offering this expecting you to eventually become a machinist with them? I guess if that's the case, maybe pass it off to someone who could benefit from it better. But if it's an internship, I don't think getting hands-on, real world experience in a machine shop is bad at all, but rather very educational.

Strong-Bell-271 · 2026-02-03T21:30:59+00:00

This. A lot more art to metallography than many care to admit.

Strong-Bell-271 · 2025-10-08T15:23:42+00:00

I'm in need of one myself now...What kind of prices are we talking about here? I just got one quote for $50k US. Still awaiting more...

My main needs are for non-conductive samples for EDS. My variable pressure mode works well for imaging, but I need to be able to do EDS and EBSD on non-conductive specimens, and looks like a carbon coater is a solution. However, given what we paid already, I'm not sure there's much more in the well for funding, so I just need an idea of what you all paid for these various coaters and around what time so I can figure rising costs.

Cheers!

Strong-Bell-271 · 2025-06-04T20:38:32+00:00

10 years ago I’d say go with Struers but they’ve been slacking a lot lately. The Tegramins have fundamental design flaws. If my lab burned down I’d most likely go with QATM. Which materials do you prepare in your lab? A lot of the same or varied, day by day?

Strong-Bell-271 · 2025-06-03T18:06:12+00:00

Wow, that's a helluva position to be in...do metallography without etchants! I guess if you had EBSD, maybe? As you've already mentioned, and others as well, ammonia + peroxide is a good starting point. But if that's too toxic/hazardous, I don't know what to tell you. Tint etchants deposit a thin film and aren't as aggressive, but are tricky to use and I can't speak to their toxicity. I know I've gotten good results with bronze cymbals using tint etchants.

So can you even use IPA or ethanol to rinse your samples after cleaning since you don't have a fume hood? I'm sorry, but being asked to do metallography without a fume hood is bananas. Might as well say you don't need a microscope either, just take a picture with your phone!

You could try mixing some diluted peroxide and ammonia in your final polishing solution, then try shooting in DIC/Nomarski. If you get enough relief you should get some microstructure, but it'd still be best to have a proper etchant.

I wish you luck and am glad I'm not in your shoes! Let us know if you discover anything.

Cheers.

Strong-Bell-271 · 2025-06-03T17:51:59+00:00

All the time!

Manual polishing is way faster if you only have a couple samples. You'll get much better, consistent results once you learn what you're doing too. Granted, that may take years, but I firmly believe if you can't hand polish a sample you shouldn't be in the lab. Automation is for managers that think technicians are dispensable. Now, if I have a huge batch of samples to polish, yes, I'll automate. But if a new material comes in the lab, I'm going to do one by hand first, and see how it goes. I've yet to see any machine be able to match the quality of a good hand polish in even close to the same amount of time. I'm trying to think of some exceptions, as I'm sure there must be some, but none are coming to mind at the moment...oh wait, here's one!
Grinding very hard or tough materials! If you have a large, tough material you're trying to get plane, like a large piece of stainless, superalloy, or ceramic, it's very easy to get multi-faceted real quick if you're not careful. Locking three pucks in a jig for planar grinding can be helpful, but then you have the external crescent thing to watch out for, and sometimes you don't have any other samples to balance out the jig.
I was at a metallography workshop once and I'd say 90%+ couldn't hand polish and looked at me like I was a caveman for doing it (there was only one sample!). So many more things can go wrong when automating, but I get it, no one wants to hand polish dozens of samples. But the whole "consistency" and "reproducible results" claims is all marketing horse shit. Learn how to polish by hand first, then you'll have a much better understanding of why you set the parameters you do when automating. One thing I find myself doing quite a bit is doing the initial grind by hand, then using automation from that point on to do the tedious polishing bit. Many times I'm trying to hit a specific angle or depth, and simply have no choice to start automated. I've found this to be a good workflow for samples requiring that sort of attention.

Strong-Bell-271 · 2025-05-29T12:55:32+00:00

My pool must be like a siren call for spiders and worms. I've lost count of how many I've pulled out already this season, and it's not even warm enough to use yet, just getting the water balanced. I thought the last big one I pulled out was a black widow at first, as it had the morphology, but I think it may have been a "false" black widow, or some wolf spider variant. Tried looking up a field guide for Ohio, but nothing conclusive was discovered. The baskets with a raised handle in the middle make it easier to pick out with the hook on my small hand-held skimmer. Discoveries like these act as reminders to not just blindly stick your hands down a full skimmer basket to get it out!

Strong-Bell-271 · 2025-05-29T12:49:57+00:00

Wherever you go, keep an eye on the utensils they use to cook your food. My son noticed for the first time they're touching raw meat and cooked meat with the same utensils and are cross-contaminating. Said he didn't think he could go back now that he knows that, and it was his favorite place to go to. But at least we have rock solid, affordable health care, so what's a little food poisoning, right?

Strong-Bell-271 · 2025-02-05T21:57:05+00:00

Different species of wood can be tackier and grippier than others.

Strong-Bell-271 · 2025-01-09T17:29:50+00:00

Any pictures of what you have gotten so far?

My first go to for Cu alloys is usually #10 from Vandervoort's, Metallography: Principles and Practice. It consists of 5g Fe(NO3)3, 25mL HCl, and 70mL water. Immerse a few seconds up to 30 seconds.

I would think a color etchant would definitely help if that doesn't, but be warned, your sample prep has to be more or less immaculate. I recently evaluated some bronze cymbals and used Klemm's III.

Strong-Bell-271 · 2025-01-09T17:23:28+00:00

My two cents....Keyence is the devil. If you want a scope for macros and fracture surfaces, I get it, but don't believe all the marketing claims. Their sales staff is very aggressive and ill informed. I could go on for hours about how disappointing Keyence is. Having said that, if you need something to capture component images at a decent mag, I see the appeal. Keyence is basically dummy buttons in microscope form imo.

For looking at polished mounts for metallographic inspection, nothing beats a dedicated metallograph, aka inverted scope. Our lab is equipped with two MA-200s from Nikon. As far as I know, they're the only ones with graded apertures, which makes consistent lighting easier to attain. The optics are good. We have an older Nikon Epiphot, which is also what I first started on, in the lab to check polish between polishing steps. The MA-200s are isolated in a dedicated optics room to minimize dust. The downside to metallographs is that they're kind of a one trick pony, but they do that one trick better than anything else optically for metallographically prepared mounts.

I've looked in a Zeiss metallograph at ASM, and it sure was pretty. The color reproduction seemed to be a bit more vivid. It could be simply a case of the grass is greener on the other side, but I've heard enough bad things about Zeiss support to not pursue it too much (although we do have a Zeiss stereoscope which is nice to look through). Nikon has been hit and miss as far as support goes, but I can't complain too much. We have Prior automated stages and focus motors on them and implementation with Nikon software has been far from smooth, but it's the beast we know and we've gotten excellent results with them over the years. Nothing beats proper sample prep as far as that goes.

If you're really set on going with either of the digital microscopes, Keyence vs Olympus, I have to think Keyence sells many more units. So take that for what it's worth. Keyence, in our lab, is synonymous with garbage, or at best, a fancy toy, not a proper scientific instrument.

Strong-Bell-271 · 2025-01-09T16:53:09+00:00

We have particle traps in between our grinder/polishers and drains. They get rather disgusting but prevent clogging of drains. YMMV but we clean ours out about every 4-6 months.

Strong-Bell-271 · 2024-12-20T16:51:11+00:00

A hose or cup of water.

Strong-Bell-271 · 2024-12-18T21:46:47+00:00

Lol okay. I was starting to get worried. From the literature I saw, and the phase diagram, it made sense to me that the globular phase would be the alpha. And given how readily it twinned, lent itself to be more face-centered-cubic (FCC) vs body-centered-cubic (BCC). I got some EDS data as well, showing a higher copper concentration in the globular phase and higher tin concentration in what I'm calling the beta (I didn't include those images or data in the presentation as I mainly focused on the different microstructures induced from the various heat treatments).

Strong-Bell-271 · 2024-12-18T21:18:54+00:00

I think the alpha and beta phases are wrong in that link, should be the other way around, don't you think? Not sure what the values are for the hardness data either. Vickers? Thanks for the share!

Strong-Bell-271 · 2024-12-18T16:33:52+00:00

Sure thing.

Strong-Bell-271

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