That depends upon the scientist
It's a Nikon stereo zoom doing 6-40x IIRC, but I've got it fitted with a 0.5x lens to give me more space under the objective. Finally bought an articulated arm for it a couple of months ago, so it has only been getting used for this since then.
S/H stereo microscopes crop up on EBay fairly often, they don't have to be zoom ones to be useful.
Week 2:
An introduction to the use of the bullstick scorper - the shaping of which is slightly different to the normal way of using the others. So, we spent our time setting this up - I've not used one before, so this wasn't a tool I had ready prepared. We then drilled some copper to start off some bearings, followed by widening out the holes & creating a taper bore just using the bullsticks. Again, not something I've done before - I've always gone in with a bud burr for round stones so it is an interesting exercise. The aim with this was to get the bearing cut so the 4mm CZs we're working with sit level & flush; completed 2 last night, did another one this morning.
Marcia Lanyon were there last night as well... I managed not to get *too* carried away with things, just bought some 3mm pink tourmalines, a couple of peridot bullet cabochons and a piece of tourmalated quartz that I liked the look of. The £600 tourmalines were quite appealing, but I resisted (quite liked the 1.1 carat diamond too, but never mind!).
Let us know how you set the bullets without a wobble then Peter, and wthout any banned words.
Dennis.
Epoxy
They're a relatively shallow taper on them at the base, so I'm hoping they shouldn't be too bad.
A photo of the practice piece at the moment:
No, not desperately exciting at the moment I know!
Week 3:
Bead raising with bright cutting. Continuing with the settings in the picture, we've now got the stones locked in with beads at 4 points and at the least done the rough cutting for the bright cut. I've got 2 of 4 mostly bright cut, need to finish them. My bright cutting is better with direction (the corners are much improved in particular), but it still isn't good enough - going to need a lot more practice! We've also covered a few "oops" scenarios - what to do in the event of cutting beads off, for example...
No lesson next week; I'll need to cut some more bearings to do more practice... Because I'm specifically wanting to practice the bright cutting, I'll probably cheat and do most of the bearing with a bud burr rather than the bullstick.
Do you have any pics? :-)
OK - here's a shot of a 3.75mm CZ set in gilding metal. I've got a number of criticisms of it so far - the bright cut is faceted, the beads have a small amount of flashing on them, the corners are still too ragged for my liking - but this isn't terribly easy to see with the naked eye, let alone the Optivisor.
Ended up hand-cutting the bearing again.
I probably ought not to mention that I was very slack doing this one - sat on the floor, with a Yorkshire terrier trying to stand on my shoulder...
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