Well, I agree with most of your points about the goosneck..
Perhaps not about hand holding. My hands are not all that steady.
I hope that getting it adjusted, while it may be a pain, will at least allow me to snap a picture without moving the scope when I click the mouse...


As most folks seem to just hold the bottom of the scope hard against the blade, I am hoping that it won't be too bad to get a decent focus.

I did see the stand that you posted about. It looked great, but I thought it a bit of overkill to hold a $39 camera (which is what I paid for my Veho clone). Who knows though, it is where I may end up if I get real serious about this edge image capturing...

In any case, I ordered one of the "cheap" articulating models. Much easier to justify $39 than $199.
I am a casual user. I suppose we could all buy a real microscope with camera, but again, the cost becomes prohibitive..

At least for me.

I will let everyone know what I find out when I get it. Let's hope it will work, if nothing else, better than what I have been trying to do so far.

Phil

I use a stand from DinoLite that looks like a hybrid between the two shown by holymolar. Mine is taller like the more expensive one but lacks the horizontal piece (for which I'm now jonesing.)

This is the model stand I use: Dino-Lite Stand MS35B Tabletop Rigid Versatile
Here is a picture of the microscope and stand while trying to photograph the Farid mule in the vise:



- not a very easy thing to do and the stand doesn't have quite enough reach to view the whole blade.

Thanks for sharing that Clay.
It may not be perfect, but sure looks like it is a bunch better than hand holding...

Phil

I got the model 87IN4212 "goosneck" dino lite stand a couple of days ago. I just had the tiem to play with it a bit tonight. It is far from the perfect solution, that is for sure. It is better than my trying to hand hold the unit, focus, and snap a picture... as well as trying to get any kind of reatability as to position on the blade.

I can, sort of pre-load it against the blade at the correct angle, hold the Veho and focus it. It will then stay in place while I adjust the video levels and take a shot. Repeatability, well that is a bit iffy. All in all for $39 it was an OK investment. It is still way too fiddly for my taste. I may try one like Clay has next, though from his accounts that one still takes practice and patience to get what I am looking for.

That, of course, is to get good enough that I can sharpen, take some coptures and see what I am doing without wasting 20 minutes getting the camera to where I can take a decent capture... and get back to sharpening... and also to get something useful like the pictures that Clay or Tom posts.

Oh, and Tom, what do you use to hold your camera?

Phil

holymolar wrote:


I got in that stand yesterday. And even though it is a lot cheaper in Europe than in the USA, I didn't think I would keep it. I just got it to play around with it. But then I saw the huge improvement in the quality of pictures I made with the knife still in the WEPS! So I decided to keep the stand.

This stand is not the answer to all microscope holder prayers. Particularly if you don't have a steady hand, you might still have some problems with it. The reason is that to make good photographs (at least with my Veho 400x), the microscope needs to be on top of the edge. It is very hard/impossible to do that using the vertical fine adjustment only.

The way I use this stand is as follows. I put the microscope in the holder at for example a 45 degree angle and then set about the correct height. (So the microscope will display the edge of the knife.) I then press the microscope gently against the knife and focus the microscope. (This is still somewhat fiddly, since there is not only horizontal play in the system, but also some vertical play due to the fact that the horizontal arm is so long.) Then I can take my first photograph.

But now the great part comes. I can simply push the microscope away (in the horizontal plane) and start sharpening. When I want to take a new picture, I simply move in the microscope again. It is already focused, at the same angle where it was when I took the previous photograph (so the light reflection is similar - quite important) and is directed at about the same spot where the previous photograph was taken. So the photographs are really consistent!

Here is my setup.



I am now redoing all the photographs I took for my stropping experiments with the WE pastes. (So I have do redo the stropping and some sharpening as well.) That is just as good, because the results I got were very surprising and they ask to be repeated for confirmation . I hope to post the photographs tomorrow.

Very nice! I need to look into that stand as well.

I got that microscope stand and tried it for a day but I sent it back. I just couldn't make it work any better than what I was already using. The long arm was not as stable as I had hoped and it moved too much. Also it didn't have a fine adjustment on the horizontal plane, so it didn't do what I wanted it to do. Maybe you will have better luck and make it work for you. Let us know.

The photographs I made using the microscope in this new stand are on my blog.

Just compare them I to the photographs I made for the posts on convexing edges to see the difference.