Thread: Popular double edge blades under the scanning electron microscope (SEM)

Today I am going to treat you to something real nice. Due to my current employment status I have access to a scanning electron microscope.The SEM is capable of extremely high magnifications up to (theoretically) 1.000.000times. Naturally the SEM I am using is not so much state of the art but still capable of tremendous magnifications.So far I have been able to produce images up to 5.000x magnification (Verhoeven^[1] maxed out at 3.000x). The magnification of the image is listed under SEM MAG:Up to today I have taken sample images of different popular double edge blades.The first set of pictures is a fresh Feather stainless steel blade.The blade has not been cleaned and came fresh out of the box. The blade has been gold coated via sputtering^[2]


Please click on the pictures for full image size






It is clearly visible that the blade is pretty dirty.
I made a second set of images, cleaning the blade prior to sputtering.
The Feather has been exposed to xylene steam, a highly effective organic solvent.This is what the Feather looked like this time




The next set of pictures shows a fresh Personna (red) blade. The blade has been untreated, uncleaned and sputtered.







[1] Experiments on Knife Sharpening. John D. Verhoeven, 2004
http://www.bushcraftuk.com/downloads...nifeshexps.pdf

[2] Sputtering produces coatings of gold only slightly bigger than a couple of gold atoms.
The gold makes the surface more contuctable and improves the resolution of the image.