Amazing Discovery

Cute! I don't recognize the make, but that's a nice size. Did it come with collets, a chuck or what?

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

location?

PRECISION copper removal!

while, earlier, demeaning everyone else's talents

Physics? Talent? Everyone? Where?

I've tried using my Dremel, which has a huge set of accessories, to cut copper, and it's never worked very well. I asked him how he did it.

I suppose you don't do controlled-impedance traces.

How do you like these cutouts?

ftp://jjlarkin.lmi.net/BB_fast.JPG

This circuit makes a pretty nice looking 50 ohm, 5 volt, 1 GHz square wave. Try that with a 555! Precision hacking on copperclad is the only way I know to breadboard stuff like this, short of etching PC boards.

You'd look less like a whining, clucking old hen if you had anything to say that was on topic.

John

I think so, except I think the pointy corner is more scoop-shaped, so it would actually remove a little furrow of metal as you push it.

I did a google on "engravers' tool" and came up with burin:

The trimmed blade (being pulled) just cuts through the copper, but leaves it there bunched up on either side of the cut.

Cheers! Rich

That's what I do, too. I found that the blades all break very quickly, then last a good while. They don't need to be all that sharp to cut the copper. The X-Acto knife acts more like a scraper, or plane blade, than a knife. After an initial score is made, the knife works better by pushing than pulling.

Just throw in some strawberries.

A 1/8" chuck. It's a German made EMCO. It's a nice size to machine small aluminum or brass blocks into RF housings. I am going to clean it up and take more photos when I get a chance. I also bought a Cameron precision drill press that looks almost new.

A pal of mine gave me an X-acto knife 35 years ago when we were laying out p.c. boards, cutting tape the old-fashioned way.

I'm still using the same blade. It's still razor-sharp. (I sharpen it when needed, e.g. after cutting copper.)

I love that knife.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

I have the one my mother used in high school, over 60 years ago. Aluminum handle and a brass nut.

But now we wear glasses for close work, so it isn't an issue anymore. (More's the pity.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

On a sunny day (Fri, 15 Jul 2011 17:41:14 -0700 (PDT)) it happened snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com wrote in :

Yes, I remember doing that :-) Then I discovered the ink pen, you could just draw on the copper, then etch it. Done several boards with that.

location?

location?

All you've done in this thread is cluck and whine.

Pitiful.

John

Cheer up. The parts are getting so small, nobody can see them any more.

John

I have a Mantis, the original big one with 4x and 8x objectives. (And tungsten bulbs, which I'll probably replace with LEDs eventually--the fan sounds like a jet engine.) The 4x is nice, but due to the large vertical magnification, the 8x gives me a headache after a few minutes. (The vertical mag is the square of the horizontal mag.)

The mount is a bit clunky, being a parallelogram with no focusing rack, but the microscope itself is pretty nice at low mag. One fine day I'll need to get a higher power microscope, but not today. (I have two college tuitions to pay in the next two weeks, ouch. Fortunately there's only one year of overlap.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Does it have the oblique viewing capacity?

It's a stereo microscope, i.e. the viewing angle range of the objective lens is split in the middle, with one half going to each eye so that you get stereopsis. The exit pupils are huge--an inch or more across--so you can move your head a bit and look around things, which is cool and sometimes useful, e.g. in aligning things. It's also great for soldering underneath, at least at 4X.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Have you seen Leica's patented approach to stereo microscopes? Also excellent 'eye relief' but very nice depth of field.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

only 4X ? I use mine in the 12X range most of the time. It's capable of 47X.

Jamie

I have 4x and 6x lenses for my "compact" Mantis, and I usually use the

1. But I'm nearsighted already. This is the little Mantis: small head, no turret, no fan, LEDs.

It's this one.

ftp://66.117.156.8/DSC01371.JPG

You can take good pictures through it, but the LEDs make everything a bit blue.

ftp://66.117.156.8/Mantis2.JPG

John

No, I haven't. How does it work?

You can't avoid the M**2 vertical mag--it comes right out of the imaging geometry.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs