I recently posted my first batch of photos from Milly. While I am happy with her beam performance, I was dissatisfied with the digital photo quality. Until now: It's amazing what a difference a cheap&…

I recently got Milly the big SEM online. She had a ton off issues that I’ll chronicle in future posts. But rather than dwell on her past, let’s see what she can do. Remember that 2mm stainless sc…

Milly is coming along nicely. I believe we’re over the vacuum difficulties. She’s buzzing along at a nice deep vacuum in the SPEC, INT, and GUN chambers. Last night the computer finally booted up…

[Reconnect the broken black wire, and away we go! After several days of looking, the cause of the trouble proved to be a broken lead on a thermocouple line. On to debugging the vacuum system!

Laser robot making wooden robots for an aluminum robot that makes brass robots… #slavetothemachines

["Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing." –A. Lincoln  

Happy Holidays! Here is a 2mm stainless steel screw. It’s sitting on a standard, non-shrunken quarter for scale. [This screw is just 2mm across, and is about as long as the LIBERTY on a quarter. Here …

Meryl was a little disheveled when she arrived at the shop. She had been in storage for a few years, and while mostly complete, she looked a little ragged around the edges. [Where do all those wires g…

I recently became the proud owner of a couple of discarded JEOL scanning electron microscopes. The big one (“Milly“) is a JSM-6320F from the early 1990s. The little one (“Meryl“) is a JSM-5600 from th…