Is there anyone out there who is actively making thin sections or using them regularly? I am an amateur with a 1.5 decades field tripping background, who collected rocks and began making sections some five years ago. I have collected parts of Leitz and Vickers Pol microscopes to build my own for observation and photography and have all the Atlases but I don't have any contacts in the West Country who are into any of this.
I believe that declining interest in amateur petrology has seen not only the end of the Association of Thin Section Makers but UK suppliers of decent machines within the reach of amateurs. I'm lucky to have found post war UK kit and have updated it to work well.
If there is anyone with a matching interest, please contact me, either by email or by posting a comment on this blog.
2 comments:
For anyone who wants to make thin sections - http://almandine.geol.wwu.edu/~dave/other/thinsections/
As far as I know, you don´t need machines for making thin sections. Using them makes things easier, of course, especially with granitic rocks. The only thing you need is a rock saw and several glass plates. If you have a decent pece af rock sawn out of your specimen, you can put it on a slide and grind it with grinding powder on the glas pöates. Beginning with somehow corse powder and moving further to finer powder until 1000 when reaching the right thickness. I did this wiht my samples for my PhD Thesis when the machine in our institute broke down and therefor can tell that itworks with carbonatites and softer sedimentary rocks fine. Granites are hard to work on.
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