SEM Issues

I was working on our SEM the other day I decided to look at an electron-mirror image of our machine. I had an uncoated fossil specimen in the chamber that was charging, so I magnified tightly in and let it charge up some more and moved around to built up a big charge while at 50 kv, and then dropped down to 2kv. I didn't get a great electron mirror image but it was there at least, looking like as if I had been shrunk down and was standing in between the teeth of the fossil specimen, looking around at the specimen chamber. One that that was particularly neat was that I could see parts of the charged specimen, and the other specimens on the multi-sample holder. The image of our Backscatter electron detector was severely warped however, I was actually worried that it might've actually been warped at some point, but later on when I exchanged specimens I could see that it was perfectly fine.

The problem is that when in Backscatter imaging I should be able to see all parts of the detector as bright objects, however, half of one of the halves of the main chip (not the shadow chip) was dark. This must indicate a problem. I am going to have to contact JEOL to try to find out what can be done.

Porphyritic Basalts without Coverslips

I've been looking for the above for use in both traditional light micrscopes and Scanning Electron Microscopes. I had some difficulty finding vendors when searching under 'geological thin sections', but someone in a google group suggested searching for petrographic thin sections, which has yeilded some good results. So far I've emailed

mineralopticslab.com - minoptic@sover.net
nationalpetrographic.com - npsinc@flash.net
tulsasections.com - samples@tulsasections.com

I'll hold off on contacting any others until I get some responses.