September 24th Hacking It

Made an EBSD scan of another one of our 304L Stainless Steel samples which came out much better than the first time, despite going over relatively the same polishing steps. My suspect that Yuan has a significantly better cleaning technique then I do (nobody has actually really gone over what the final cleaning steps should be). That being said, there is always something to be learned.

The third 304L Stainless Steel was also prepared today. This will most likely be the specimen we use to build a 3D-dataset from. The other two were initially used to confirm whether we had a working polishing procedure or not. The last few days which we have spent trying to figure all of this out is a reminder that every lab may have very different procedures. Even something as simply as polishing may differ, or something like furnace ramp up times. That being said, I should definitely try and prepare my samples way advance in time to circumvent these issues, such that they can be loaded on the EBSD immediately and be tested. This should be a relatively easy procedure, with the exception of thinning down the sample to just 200um. Seeing one of my classmates grind down her samples to 100um, I realize that this may be a much harder task than I originally anticipated.

The actual title of this blog post again has to deal with some of issues we've been having. I've mentioned the problems with coming up with an appropriate sample holder (which was resolved by created a custom one). Over the weekend while attempting to make our scans, we noticed another issue in that for our longer samples, we didn't have a secure method to clamp the sample in the SEM. The sample holder that was available at the same time was too small to do anything. So our approach was to use a sawblade and wafer down the sides to increase the space in the middle between the clamping sidewalls. While Yuan and I tried our best, this unfortunately didn't work out as well as we wished, and will most likely be taking it the machine shop.

At some point Yuan had mentioned that this is "relatively unimportant". I thought about it and realized that I agreed completely with him. This is the work that will never be mentioned in a paper, an interview, and perhaps not even in a meeting. We should always be more concerned with the final outcome then the intermediate steps. As long as the intermediate steps are sufficient to produce the results we need, then it is okay to proceed. Recognize your problems, solve then in the easiest manner, and continue onwards.

Perfectionism will hinder research.