Half way up the learning curve.

[The QCC]

Eight preliminary thin section slides.
The presentation shows the preliminary results of making eight thin section slides from mostly domestic rocks.
Domestic in that I picked them up while out walking along the local creek.
The slides need further grinding and polishing to achieve the 30 micron "ideal" thickness. Most are between 50-80 microns. Transparent, but not quite thin enough.
Two exceptions are the Landscape Marble sample 2 at 35 microns and the Sea Shell fragment at 45 microns. It is not possible to grind and polish the sea shell fragment any thinner. I tried and ended up with a highly polished spot of epoxy.

Unless I get too carried away with grinding and polishing, there should be a follow up with cleaner images. Minus the sea shell.

Notes about the specimens.
As stated many times, I am not a geologist. The names on the slides are essntially the colour of the rock when I picked it up.
The Landscape Marble is one of those white rocks you use for growing weeds in a flowewr bed.
The Hobby Rocks are the tiny little stones you get in landscaping kits when building model houses.
The Renovation Rubble is a piece of broken concrete from an apartment renovation.

All of the photos were taken with a Canon 5D MkII camera, a Meiji 2.5x photo lens and the Labomed microscope.
Click to view eight preliminary thin section slides

Renovation Rubble. 10x obj.

Ruble#13_5MLX_10x_06-Edit.jpg (93.21 KiB) Viewed 4269 times

[/url]

[billbillt]

This is looking like a good start...

[Dennis]

QCC,

in guitarmaking, abalone and other inlay materials are used.
Stewart MacDonald or Luthier Mercantile etc... might have stuff (Or their supplier) that isn't suitable for guitar inlay but gain to you.

-Dennis

[The QCC]

Dennis:

Thank you for the suggestion.

There is a guitar shop in out city. I will contact them.

[SteveSteve]

QCC,

Nice slides! Respect due to anyone hand grinding rock thin sections. I have done that (years ago) and it's tricky. Are you grinding them on glass with corundum powders?

Cheers
Steve

[The QCC]

I started out grinding on a glass lapping plate with silicon carbide grits. That method worked if I could cut a starting slice thin enough. Which I had great difficulty doing without a proper saw.

I have "graduated" to using a power saw, flat lap machine and finishing off with the glass lap and 1 micron diamond paste.