The $17 microscope
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The word "microscope" grabbed my attention. Had to comment. I definitely need microscopes for my hobby of over 50 years - it's microscopy!
I have 5 scopes permanently set up (all research-grade - three stereos, one compound, one inverted compound) and two field scopes for sample-collecting trips. There's another three microscopes scattered about as "parts" adapted for other imaging tasks and objective lenses all over the place. Then there's all the studio macro gear for extreme close-up photography too. Another bunch of lenses, two motorised rail setups (for focus stacking) and all the lighting gear.
I do like looking closer! Here's the tip of a modern diamond-tipped glass cutter for decoration. I managed to break the tip somehow, but it's worked much, much better ever since. The tip was smooth and conical, but the pic shows it got sharper at the break....
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matkinitice
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There's a load on Amazon for under a tenner. 30/60x, this should be good enough right? I'll tack one onto my next amazon order if so.
pgrbff
Established Member
Can you recommend an inexpensive scope, probably second hand, to look at a chisel point but where you can see maybe an edge 10mm wide? I was absolutely rubbish at physics, E at A level I think, so I have no idea what to look for. I have peak loupes, X15 and Peak stand microscopes, X50, but they are a bit awkward to use.
A scope isn't entirely suitable for what you want to examine, as you have experienced, so I wouldn't recommend one - inexpensive or otherwise.
The thing is, the most important part of "seeing" details in any magnified image is the lighting. Think about how you'd inspect a chisel by eye when you're sharpening it. You look at it of course, but then hold it up, tilt it around to catch a glint of the honed area, hold it against the light to see the profile of the edge and so on. There's a wealth of information to be "seen" in even a moderately magnified image (and an unmagnified one) but you can't see everything under one set of lighting conditions - as you generally get with a microscope.
So I would recommend a 10x hand loupe. You can move everything around and change the lighting easily. It's worth spending the extra to get a triplet lens for more contrast and clarity and better sharpness near the perimeter, but not vital if you're on a tight budget.
I have a different loupe in every coat/jacket, every camera bag and next to every microscope. Well, that's what I intend - but it generally ends up as all the loupes in one camera bag, which I can't find!
But my pocket one is always there - a Belomo 10x triplet. It has quirks and the hinge wore out after 5 years of daily use (which was easy to fix) but it's one of the better ones IMO.Hope that helps.
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pgrbff
Established Member
Sometimes I would like to look at a larger area. I'm currently flattening a 6mm chisel and there are 3 distinct areas. Approximately 0.5mm of the whole edge which, by the reflection of light, appears to be rounded over, the area immediately behind it that is flat, and a corner which appears to be damaged. This is a quality Japanese chisel by a well-known maker and new. Is there any way I can see all 3 areas at the same time albeit at a lower magnification?A scope isn't entirely suitable for what you want to examine, as you have experienced, so I wouldn't recommend one - inexpensive or otherwise.
The thing is, the most important part of "seeing" details in any magnified image is the lighting. Think about how you'd inspect a chisel by eye when you're sharpening it. You look at it of course, but then hold it up, tilt it around to catch a glint of the honed area, hold it against the light to see the profile of the edge and so on. There's a wealth of information to be "seen" in even a moderately magnified image (and an unmagnified one) but you can't see everything under one set of lighting conditions - as you generally get with a microscope.
So I would recommend a 10x hand loupe. You can move everything around and change the lighting easily. It's worth spending the extra to get a triplet lens for more contrast and clarity and better sharpness near the perimeter, but not vital if you're on a tight budget.
I have a different loupe in every coat/jacket, every camera bag and next to every microscope. Well, that's what I intend - but it generally ends up as all the loupes in one camera bag, which I can't find!
Hope that helps.
Zoom in with a phone camera?
that is a spectacular picture. I've shown a lot of pictures of flat things on here, often more for discussion than the figure that people will fully grasp them, but to get lighting and depth on something magnified is a whole other ball game. Beyond my abilities.
I've seen some cobbled setups with phone cameras that take nice pictures. If the software will allow it and the lighting is good, even zooming in with a high resolution and good phone will allow seeing things at least as well as a loupe, but more importantly, if you're doing something and trying to improve, it will allow you to save the pictures and compare.
I've laid my phone on top of a dissection scope lens and taken magnified pictures before - in the end, they aren't that clear, but they're good enough to be on par with this hand scope. The hand scope is easier. These days, though, the phones all seem to be coming with multiple lenses and I don't know that that helps (confusing). And my most recent phone, which isn't a cheap one - doesn't seem to like close up pictures. I kind of miss a good single lens on the older high end phones like the samsung S8.
Exemplified by my first knife edge picture. You can see the edge is perfectly straight. I couldn't get a head on view of it because of glare, though, so the picture has to be indirect. Full light pictures with some depth at high magnification are spectacular. I'm guessing that some of that can be due to cost as a fellow sent me a picture of an A2 blade with wear, and I later discerned the bubbles on the surface were carbides.
However, the picture he took was gotten in layers by some $25k setup, and ....for any of us, great if you can get free access to it.
A $425 indian microscope (which I had because I was buying and reselling natural japanese stones at the time, and it's really the only honest way to grade them - to see what they do - and then recommend what a given stone would be good for), will take pictures like this without much trouble.
But it's designed to view flat things.
What that picture of - for me - is carbides. I wanted to trial heat treat methods and a few different makers of 1095 steel (notoriously low quality vs. other steels that generally have a more discerning market in the west) and see if I could get carbides out of solution as more carbides appearing on 1095 means less carbon tied in the steel matrix. 1095 suffers from too much, and ultimately, a different alloy is a better solution in almost every case where cost doesn't matter, but you can see as the steel has worn at the edge, little "comets" appear behind the carbides and you can tell they're spherical.
That's not going to be possible with a $17 scope. It would be possible on a better scope on both sides, but it's possible with mine (field of view top to bottom is 9 thousandths of an inch) on the flat side of the iron and that's good enough.
It's maybe over the heads and below the interest level of some folks here, but you can unwind some mysteries of just what some of the older steels were. If there are no carbides appearing in them or very little, you know they are a relatively low carbon level (below about 0.9 or so, and if none appear at all, probably more like below 0.8%), and with little alloying. And they (like a round topped stanley plane iron) really don't have much upside if they're rehardened.
Manipulating carbon in solution vs. forming carbides (better) is actually something that's fairly easy to learn to do by hand if just testing samples, and keeping pictures. Talking about that kind of stuff got me banned in a knife forum, though. I would be more than willing to bet that in sheffield, they were looking at the same things and using it to adjust method. It's just thought of as not possible to do consistently now without a computer controlled furance, which is nonsense.
Backtracking away from the brain dump, though, I think two things are nice:
1) when you can see what you need to for $17, because it'll save time and money if anyone is making things 100x over through the course of a hobby
2) if people who take spectacular pictures will take pictures of things we want to see
Side comment, a dissection scope would also see this, but I think it may be worth nothing that not all japanese chisels are designed to be flat- you may know this, and it can be subtle.
They may have bias with the expectation that you'll put finger pressure on the bevel and maintain something like 1/2" length at a time when keeping the back flat.
You can also back into something easier to see by running the whole back on a coarse stone and then a fine one or markering it. Chances are, if you're seeing 0.5mm of edge like that, it just needs to be ground, flattened or honed off.
phone magnified is still a good idea if your phone will allow macro. You can get effectively 5-10x quickly and then see the picture rather than holding the view in focus, if that makes sense. That is, it may be easy to get a good picture for a second if the object or the scope isn't stable and tedious to try to keep it, but if you can snap a picture you can look at it once or twice and allow ideas to float into your head.
I forgot something about my other scope - that it has two lengths where it's in focus, one more far away from an item, and one close. the more distant focal length (lower mag - 40-50x maybe?) makes viewing things manually easier, and you could use a scope like this to easily look at the edge from anything like a 1/4" chisel to an entire plane iron.
I made a little video looking at two chisels - the first is a chisel from sheffield that nobody really ever set up and I haven't used. It's a narrow firmer.
The second is a 1095 chisel that I made and only initially sharpened, but never finished polishing the back. You can see that I don't have trouble getting the honing to the edge, though. I never finished it because 1095 is only just OK for chisels compared to other steels. It can wait until later when I need something that can be ground for a specific use.
There are still things that a loupe is helpful with on the fly, but often a loupe will allow you to see something a little better and still not be sure.
If anyone wants to see what the better edge here looks like polished, I'll do it and show it. It's not more than 2 minutes to finish the job properly.
I made a little video looking at two chisels - the first is a chisel from sheffield that nobody really ever set up and I haven't used. It's a narrow firmer.
The second is a 1095 chisel that I made and only initially sharpened, but never finished polishing the back. You can see that I don't have trouble getting the honing to the edge, though. I never finished it because 1095 is only just OK for chisels compared to other steels. It can wait until later when I need something that can be ground for a specific use.
There are still things that a loupe is helpful with on the fly, but often a loupe will allow you to see something a little better and still not be sure.
If anyone wants to see what the better edge here looks like polished, I'll do it and show it. It's not more than 2 minutes to finish the job properly.
Jacob
New Luddism. Wake up and resist.
A magnifying glass?
a lot of cheap loupes now feature a very bright led light, as do most of the cheap usb microscopes. Very handy. But you're right about lighting. For small watch parts I tend to stick them on a piece of rodico putty, similar to blue tac, then move them about slightly on the base until the light is just where you need it. For many purposes I can see the type of usb microscopes that are just a housing on the end of a lead would be handy, and are very cheap. Mine does allow you to unclip it from the stand so you can use it like this, only problem is the lead joining it to the screen is quite short, and you need steady hands!A scope isn't entirely suitable for what you want to examine, as you have experienced, so I wouldn't recommend one - inexpensive or otherwise.
The thing is, the most important part of "seeing" details in any magnified image is the lighting. Think about how you'd inspect a chisel by eye when you're sharpening it. You look at it of course, but then hold it up, tilt it around to catch a glint of the honed area, hold it against the light to see the profile of the edge and so on. There's a wealth of information to be "seen" in even a moderately magnified image (and an unmagnified one) but you can't see everything under one set of lighting conditions - as you generally get with a microscope.
So I would recommend a 10x hand loupe. You can move everything around and change the lighting easily. It's worth spending the extra to get a triplet lens for more contrast and clarity and better sharpness near the perimeter, but not vital if you're on a tight budget.
I have a different loupe in every coat/jacket, every camera bag and next to every microscope. Well, that's what I intend - but it generally ends up as all the loupes in one camera bag, which I can't find!
Hope that helps.
there's definitely something about each cheap one that reminds you why it's cheap. This one is awfully good if there's a need for it, but the base is lightweight and you can't adjust focal length without jiggling it all over the place. That could be solved by just putting it in a better arm or adding a lot of weight to the base.
The whole thing if you have something that doesn't sit stable is a three hand operation for people who have two, though. You can tell by the amusement park jiggly in the video.
The metallurgical scope that I have has a relatively low cost XY base, but it's still a world of improvement...most of the time. the scale of magnification can be a lot higher though and any movement at all is really disorienting with it, even just the movement from microadjustments.
The older one of these is directly responsible for me being able to shrink grain hardening and tempering steel, though - the grain size of good fine grained steels are too fine to see with the naked eye, and you can sort of see minor differences when the grain isn't as fine as it should be, but I don't want to be seeing that at all in the first place!! Some of the things I think I see with a naked eye or a loupe are reverse of the truth when getting steel to the scope.
This is 1084 steel that I overheated for 15 seconds at what's probably 50x magnification.
This makes a passable plane iron but not a particularly good chisel.
The difference between that and this is hard to see by eye:
But it's drastic under this cheap scope. This is the same piece of steel, made big grain and then by learning to do things that look good under the scope, shrunk.
