I was going to update with "how to make thin sections" part 3, but then I thought I could talk about searches people do to get to weblogs. Which would you prefer?

Okay, I'll do the "thin sections" bit quickly and then move on. :)

Today we were grinding our impregnated and stuck to slides samples, so that the coverslips could be stuck on. And everything went wrong that could possibly go wrong. To begin, with only one of all the samples that we did last week had worked. The epoxy resin hadn't set properly on some of the samples, and on some it had gone all cloudy. Useless! FCOL. I was given the surviving sample to grind. (Great.)

We were using a horizontal wheel to do the grinding, which means you stand there for ages and it makes your arms (and hands) ache. The person teaching us was constantly complaining about how useless the equipment was - the grinder doesn't have a switch on it, so someone else has to stand by the plug so that you can shout at them when you want it turned off. Hmm. And the thing that dripped water onto the wheel didn't work, so someone else had to stand there and hold a hose so that the wheel would stay wet.

My wheel grinding was stopped before everyone else's, so I had to do more grinding by hand. With the glass sheet and the silicon carbide. It took TWO HOURS in total to grind the pottery thin enough (30 microns - half the width of a human hair!). And right towards the end, guess what happened? The only surviving bit of pottery from that batch gave up. Yes, the resin lifted and I lost most of the sample. Aaargh! But I kept grinding, because I'd spent so long doing it that it seemed a shame to stop. Which means I have an okay thin section, but it's quite small. Drat...

So that's the thin sections. Someone else was going to stick the coverslips on. And next week we're actually looking at slides under the microscope. Ooer!

That was actually quite long. Maybe I'll leave the "what people search for" thing until later.

Google has a lot to answer for!

Check out this site for a laugh. :D

posted by Fiery Fred @ 9:44 PM