If you ever get the chance, or have the means, I highly recommend you take a look at some everyday objects under an electron microscope. Put a grasshopper in a SEM, and you’ll see something that looks incredibly like what you would find in a human anatomy book, except the bones are on the outside in the case of a grasshopper. Take a look at some cool MEMS accelerometers and gyroscopes under a SEM, and you’ll find a world of simple machines — levers and wedges — machined out of microscopic pieces of metal.
Kenny Brown is a researcher with access to a scanning electron microscope and recently had the idea of making a few stands for SEM stubs for preparation or storage. Yes, it’s just a platform for the little platforms used to hold the sample, but at five dollars for a five-pack it’s probably the cheapest and most useful device you’ll find in a research lab.
These single SEM stub stands (say that five times fast) are made with a soy-based photopolymer resin. They’re a great way to store a stub on a shelf or in a drawer, and much more handsome than plopping a stub into a bit of foam. Keep in mind these stub holders are not conductive, so they’ll need to be sputter coated if they’re to be used in a scanning electron microscope.
You can check out a few pics and videos of this stub stand over on Kenny Brown’s Instagram. It’s not the usual sort of thing he puts on his Tindie store, but there is apparently a shortage of small, attractive stub holders on the market, and he thought he’d give this a go. Good work.
