Cutting mirrors with Diamonds 

Those tiny chips under the electron microscope are so cool!! Also a 2.5 micron finishing pass is INSANE. Great video as always dude!

Your method of using Blender to render the AFM height data yields the most professional looking height visualizations I've seen in my 16 years of science. After introducing you to optimal color map design, you're showing me new tricks. :)

I love how one guy in a garage have all this nice equipment. I am doing a PHD in experimental physics, and I have to make metalic pieces by hand, one could only dream!

No sponsor?? @KernMicrotechnikGmbH where you at? Get this man on a plane!

What you're calling the "rake angle" is normally called the "cutting edge angle". Rake is the angle of the face that the chip rolls over, relative to the normal of the cutting plane.

this is the highest level of DYI

The microscope shots in your videos are always fascinating. It's a view that I never get to see in the rest of my life

Glad to see MCD and diamond machining getting the large scale attention it deserves. My master plan is slowly working 😁 Edit: Just got to the end of the video! Thanks for the holler!

Hey! If you're ever interested in other cool crystals (like big chunks of optical sapphire) I'd be happy to send you some.

If your metal is impure with gritty bits but you can machine extremely precisely, then maybe deposit some ultra pure layer on top and machine half of that?

As a telescope mirror maker, I'm just screaming screaming screaming to finish it up with a very dilute cerium oxide slurry, haha.

Ever since that short video few days ago I was eagerly waiting for this.. Amazing tech! Both what you did and what it's going to be used for!

How nice that quantum technology will finally be more accessible to us average joes. Dusting off my old 2 micron milling machine.

Hi! Want to try something to improve surface finish with a MCDT? Coat the surface to be finished with a Sharpie marker. Learned by accident from a co-worker that partially coated a surface. The blue spots of sharpie stood out, even if the tool cut the surface. It was shinier than the uncoated surface. We then discovered that there is search papers written about surface tension induced by an adhesive ( such as glue stick, sharpie, paint marker,etc). It was found to improve surface finish. Let me know if you try it 👍 As always, I really enjoyed your videos , fantastic work 🤘

OMFG those baby curls!! :D I never thought I would think of a metal shaving as "cute", but here we are!

I love the contrast where there's atomic force microscopy and that mist cooling setup in the same video.

Awesome work and fantastic visuals!My inner voice screamed when you lifted and reset the tool in the z axis over and over, I was so excited when you addressed my thought immediately afterwards and talked about the improvements😅

It is amazing that such level of precision can be achieved on modern regular industrial cnc.

Video sugestion: would be fun to see you rank your projects in a tier list. As you develop you workshop in the highest level of "DIYness" I think some of the projects have become, although amazing, so out of proportion from what mortals call a DIY that we cant even begin to apreciate your work the way we should. I think a tier list would be a good video to reconect with the mortal plane and maybe incentivise some of us to ascend too (Hope you don't mind the jokes). Could be in a scale of technical or theoretical difficulty, "coolness", satisfaction of the end result, affordability, etc. Anyway, your channel is awesome.

19:17 Quality over quantity 👍

14:40 my face when microscopically planing copper with a single-crystal diamond tool gives you tearout like cherry burl.

We found, when doing ultra high resolution scans, that the ball screw lubrication made a heck of a difference.

Sorry, your "Huge 8 micron" chips made me giglgesnort... These high precision tools and projects are amazing thanks for the vid.

You have to machine it in one motion not swirling or back and forth or whatever you're doing, that's where you're going wrong. The surface must be milled to zero tolerance then slowly cut one pass but first put a bevel on the edge of the copper so you're not starting from flat and presenting a chip from the start. I've been involved in industrial mechanics and CNC machining for more than 30 years.

Just for fun did you checked that diamond in close up to see if it doesn't have any super small surface issues?

Wow dude, what an awesome video! The cinematography must've taken ages. Thanks for bringing the world of machining to life💪

We still have quite a lot of milling machines that technically use hydrostatic ways (they have central lubrication that maintains oil pressure) I’d claim. They have excellent stiffness and wear resistance when under high loads, such as stainless and hardmilling. As I can achieve 0,25um Ra in aluminium using non-polished carbide inserts, I’d reckon those machines would be absolutely perfect for making mirrors. Diamond MCD tooling is ubiquitous these days, but more on lathes than milling machines. Ive just never tried it.

This is just so cool. Just a middle aged guy admiring your work. I especially like how you talk through your process and problem solve. I'm sure many hours went into your research..setup..tests etc. A admire your tenacity with a project like this. Really cool to see. Thank you

As a 20 year machinist that does the complete opposite end of the spectrum(I'll spin a 100,000lbs assembly on a 12ft swing lathe and take chips the size of your spindle), and I appreciate how cool this stuff is. I do some small stuff too, but the smallest is like drilling 0.015" holes, or holding +/-0.000¹", not a few nanometers lol

@0:33. THAT machine is what scientists use to create a Bose-Einstein Condensate. They use the lasers to cool down the sodium atoms and use evaporative cooling to do the job.

Try Tellurium copper it is a free machining alloy. Some machines have servo amplifier gain noise that can cause the chattering or its just the ball screw bearings. If possible try cutting on the Y axis to see which axis is worse. Heck even a compound motion to see if it will eliminate it. could be machine harmonics. Great video !!!!

jesus christ, so imagine doing this entire process and troubleshooting all these steps. Now imagine doing all of it and having to keep it extremely well documented and then editing and making all of these sick visuals with high speed and different scientific visuals. This content is so impressive.

0:00-3:45 and as a CNC-machinist I'm already blown away... just WOW! Thank you for sharing this great knowledge in such immaculate quality, you got a new Sub ^^

Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.

oooh sparkly

this is so fucking good and packed with information. but i never got bored. you jsut added weirder and weirder tools. "ill just pop it into my electron microscope. i never leave home without one." -Oh whats that? in my other back pocket? - "oh thats just my atomic force microscope, had it since i was 12"

Oh man, would've loved to show my granddad this video. He was an oldschool aerospace engineer with a metal machining hobby. Someone doing this on their own would've blown his mind.

Love the way you present your work - very clear, no extraneous "noise". And nice results on the mirror shaping!

The YT recommendations I receive are often mediocre, but once in a blue moon I get gems like this video of yours. Impressive!

Being able to see things like this that i didn't know existed and is so niche and fascinating is why i love youtube

Watching you do stuff that I'd never consider in my wildest dreams to be DIY possible gives me similar feelings to watching Mythbusters back in the day. I'm just amazed.

Dawg..... Ive only seen like 3 of your videos so far, but the quality is just insane. This is becoming one of my favorite channels

Don't forget, the ball screws are turned by brushless DC motors. Not steppers but still have a certain "step" to them based on how expensive the drives are. They are digital and will produce "steps" even if we can't see them or hear them.

This was really good. I watched your short video on these mirrors and had so many questions and doubts. You answered all my questions and doubts with this video. Nicely explained, excellent footage!

Probably an easier & cheaper method is sputtering copper\alum. over glass or sillicon wafer, then glue them to the a machined metal part with the correct angles needed. Consider that precision telescope mirrors are made this way.

Dude! Those SEM pics. Wow. Great work with the toolpathing

As the video was going I was doing my own commentary, then as it progressed you addressed what I was saying. I had to make a part for a very well known "Place" we will say. I have a small desktop sub 200 pound aluminum framed machine. Its highly accurate, but with the specs on the part I was doing I found that if I heated my machine in an enclosure just above 300 degrees F I would not get any thermal expansion. It took me over 3 months of trial and error to machine pillars in a substrate that was less then 25 microns tall. You did a great job. One thing I did have to do and was thinking a solution to the differences in copper harness was tempering each substrate before trying to machine them. My though was "Level the playing field"

My jaw was on the floor with your opening shot. Fascinating stuff to someone whose run-of-the-mill surface finish is a 4" angle grinder or maybe the da sander if I'm feeling particularly fussy. Appreciate your output fella, keep it up! ✌ 🇦🇺

This is ASMR fo some of us nerds. Reminds me of how we did machining in university. But we measured in millimeters. Your measurements blew my mind.

I paused your video when you mentioned hydrostatic bearings to go learn more about it and then deja vu when I got to the ending of your video to see Cylo's footage that I just watched!

Never thought I would be interested in cutting mirror surfaces with diamonds, yet here I am wanting more!

I didnt know someone will take surface finish so seriously, amazing video!

The reason you can't find larger stock of ultra pure aluminum is because it's sale is restricted a bit since it is used in the nuclear fission field since aluminum is one of the few materials that neutron radiation doesn't cause to degrade since it returns to aluminum after it decays from being given all those extra neutrons. As such the smaller pieces are probably being recycled rapidly to keep the prices low so you aren't going to find cutoffs since collecting small cutoffs over time through multiple channels is one method to circumvent anti-proliferation treaties. Again, people trying to kill each other ruins perfectly good science and economic solutions to problems.

From my brother..... That is quite interesting and very cool. There is one more thing that might have caused his wavy appearance - stiction (caused by the co-efficient of friction being higher when stationary than moving). I remember from reading an Amateur Scientist in a Scientific American way back that there are materials that have, in effect, negative stiction (where the coefficient of friction is less when stationary than when moving). The guy in the AS article used that type of material in effect as the “ways” on his scriber for scribing a diffraction grating.

the coolest part of these IMO is how strong the binding is between the carbon lattice and the metal that holds the cutting bit.. Basically the carbon lattice is formed electrochemically and this essentially works as the strongest glue ever

Absolutely amazing video, thank you! The absolute thickness of the resulting chip isn't necessarily correlated to the absolute depth of cut - you can see this difference in your video where you cut metal inside an electron microscope. There are also some videos from roughly the 40s that show this. You can also tell some information about this from the texture of the inside of the chips - there is lots of compressive stress as the texture is very rough but the outside is smooth. That rough surface would have been smooth before the cut assuming you'd have machined it already (which you must have in order to get uniform chips to measure). This is perhaps a long-winded way of explaining why the chips end up coiled - because of the compressive stress causing the material to yield and permanently deform.

We are cutting lacquers and DMM copper plates with diamond cutter with 3μm rim. With that knowledge available from record cutting the procedure to determine the optimal rake angle of the cutter to avoid the chip being a problem is known in our craft You do almost do the same thing , just in a different field and down to the nanometer dimensions. - we remain just about still in the μm world - well done, great what you proofed and found independently and a worthwhile video

This is surely the astrophysics of machining. My mind is completely blown.

The humble hardworking genius is back at it again, doing things that the majority of us had no idea were even possible. Some banger tunes on this video too. I had to Shazam the outro song.

I love that the internet has enabled us to do things like crowd-source the funding for a postdoc in materials science and metrology.

6:39 the following part almost fits to the rhythm! Amazing technology. I can only try to imagine what we could make with that. Like tiny versions of bigger instruments, without much more engineering but magnitudes of order more precise.

Amazing video! Thanks for including all the images from your precision instruments. I'm still working in thousandths, so it amazes me to behold the world of micron scale.

I always love watching your videos twice, once on Nebula, then again here so that you can get more engagement.

This is fascinating. Flatness and smoothness is something I got a great appretiation of plastering a wall. Both together are hard. Those tiny cutting chips are so cool, Stunning micrographs. The shaping machine. Hand powered shapers are available, used to make geko skin moulds and internal gears. Analysis of chip thickness I've never seen before, the difference of the roughness of the two sides is amazing. To see the ball bearing difference and runout in the face was beautiful.

Having heard you talk about the temper of the copper stock it occurred to me that it would be easy enough to anneal the copper stock by simply heating it with a torch until it's red hot and letting it cool back to room temperature on it's own. This insures consistently soft material to work with.

Nifty AF ! & Cylo is very much sub worthy.

the high speed video looks amazing! need to send those to manufacturing and material lecturers for licensing. It's too good to not be used in class around the world.

You have some of the most small batch but high interest projects I come across. When you're getting into micron perfection, the frequency of steppers/actuators even come into question on what truly makes the smoothest of the smooth cuts. NASA has some really interesting white papers on mirror surfacing that one can find with some intense google-fu. I came across some other 'light reading' with Edwin Hubble's techniques of achieving flatness even in his time which was remarkable. The irony of the Hubble telescope's early issues did not go unnoticed. 😉

You set the bar SO High for the rest of us. Well done dude! Well done! 😎👌

Dude, your channel is always a pleasure. This video was a blast. Those microscopic chips are so cute.

I love when I figure out how to get a consistent mirror-finish on a piece of copper with my monocrystalline diamond machine.

This video rocks love your voice over and you sharing this for free is gold you get a 10/10

Everything in this video is peak awesome!

2 AM and i watched a guy make a mirror out of a piece of copper with tools i know nothing about for purposes i probably wouldn't understand. God i love the modern world

It's so amazing to see at the microscopic level in HD. Crazy :)

A leader or a man of action in a crisis almost always acts subconsciously and then thinks of the reasons for his action.

"no longer the huge, 8 micron thick chips!" loved the video - great work!

Awesome and so fascinating Old timer engineer here and this an eye opener for me 😳 Wow just wow subbed You learn something new every day 👍

Absolutely love your video(s)! A lifetime ago, I used to help build and design AFMs, and it's so cool to see how you've used yours."

You make a lot of neat videos, but I think this might just be my favorite one yet - hitting that precision machine design part of my brain just right!

Oh no, what a rabbit hole to fall into! I fear following you down that hole will lead to an angry rabbit with fangs, like that one in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Amazing work!

Simply incredible.. Your content continues to astound me on every new video you release. [Chef's kiss]!

I cannot get over those perfect chips starting at 17:00. Great work!!!

Wtf this is so next level. My dude is talking about the project like he is 3d printing a nerf gun and not two steps behind bleeding edge quantum computer research.

Two experiments you could try. One is Areogel gravity experiment the other is converting the mirror from copper to graphene, like diamond mirror does not burn. One concept is that gravity is entanglement, as large items slowly share their entanglement they pull the fabric of space time, and compound entanglements so they do not appear to be so. So, if you surround a small speck of aerogel with entangled light it floods the speck with tertiary entanglements lowering its connection to the overall fabric of space time. In other words, making the aerogel speck just slightly lighter in weight. Diamond mirrors are common now combining laser beams using the mirrors in an oxygen free vacuum that prevents it from burning. If you convert the copper surface to graphene and separate it you should get a supper light weight version of a diamond mirror put in nitrogen or vacuum environment for laser optics, your death ray, or laser cutter.

I am so glad you are making this. You’re one of my favourites. Bravo.

I really have no Idea why the algorithm thinks I like this vid. But damn those 20min felt like 3. Why is that so interesting and satisfying

Very cool video! I was initially interested in your channel from your early machining videos and this was super cool to see it tie into that stuff.

"High precision gravity mapping".... mind blown at this practice...

Your videos are always so beautiful. I can’t thank you enough for putting in the effort you do.

He who lives in harmony with himself lives in harmony with the universe.

It's amazing to achieve this precision alone, it feels like you unlocked some alien technology

This is impressive. Even more being it's your own setup. Diamond turning is a really interesting method of creating optical surfaces, and I'm very interested how your v1 trap worked out!

I remember an awesome video showing scribing done on DIY CNC mill, including fine control of the spindle for direction changes. Had a hunt but couldn't find it. It occurs to me that an obvious option for improving the finish of your mirrors is to create a lapping tool with the same technique. Those little scratches and waves would polish right out in a few minutes and I'm sure you could get a near perfect mirror finish if you're careful.

I'm a sucker for the miniaturization world. It never ceases to amaze me what big, clumsy, human sausage fingers are capable of creating at the micron scale. There's an apocryphal WW2 story, very like untrue, about a gauntlet thrown down by British scientists who, as a boast, sent the Germans a sub-millimeter twist drill bit. As the story goes, they then later received a package containing the original bit with a hole drilled down the center... This kind of thing tickles me pink and, even though it may be a ridiculous story, I'd love to see someone with the tools and know-how investigate how feasible it might actually be.

Only the second RU-vidr with a electron microscope that I've seen.

Crackin me up with "my tenths indicator doesn't really move at all." 😂

keep doing what you're doing, its super appreciated, shine on you crazy monocrystalline diamond!

Very cool video, love this. I feel like having the metal colder would help bonds be stiffer but at the same time more stiffness would make jaged breakouts. Warmer metal would be softer but then you form pools of metal that bunch up in front of the tool. What if everything was very cold but introduce very high vibration on the head so you only heat up whats being scraped off the surface. Optics are tough, this was a great watch and gets the brain going to achieve the ultimate finish. The vibrations will probably cause so many other issues in surface finish. Just due to the tooling bending from side to side chaging cutting angle and the inertia in the tooling machines... would be awesome to experiment like you, this is a very rewarding experiment!

I know close to nothing about machining, but this was a really enjoyable watch!