Eyes Wide Open;..."Seeing" the Scratch

Can you just imaging the POWER you would have if someone were to blame you for scratching a million bux in scratched glass but you could provide the evidence that this was an absolute lie!  This post is going to prove to you that you will have that power.  Lets look at the animal!

This is a scratch from a dime.  It looks like a fat worm with about a hundred lit up body sections.  This is a typical characteristic of metal scratches as you can see further down.  They represent jumps or skips.

These scraches are all created by a 220 SiC coated piece of black 3M emery paper.  If I had made a circle the scratches would have been circular.  What IS significant about these scratches is if you use the same magnification you can determine roughly the rating of the coated paper.  This one was a 3M 220.

I created this interesting scratch using a small piece of broken bottle glass.  It is more of an abrasion band than a series of very fne scratches.  But it is very characteristic of a scratch from a broken piece of glass.  Very typical of the kind of scratches that people create on storefront glass with broken bottles.

This is George Washingtons eye from a dollar bill turned sideways.  At the same mag that I have taken the other micrographs here.  I have included it because it gives you a better idea of size.

This is the 220 3M emry coated that I used to create the perfectly parallel scratches above.  The bright reflective area is the glue holding the silicon carbide (SiC) particles together.  The particles are the black area.  These pictures are significant because they help us in finding the best paper for grinding glass which preps it for using cerium oxide slurry.

This scratch is VERY interesting.  It is a metal scratch.  I made it using a cheap pair of steel scissors.  You can see the segmentations of the previous metal scratch made with a dime.  But these are so much more defined.  They are perfectly circular and tend to be a similar distance apart in different places.  It makes me want to talk with some of the hair dressors on my route that buy 300 dollar scissors.  My guess is that metal has a greater "slip factor" which changes the look of the scratch.

This is a magnified image of the scratches made with the 220 Coated Paper.  You can see how parralel they are next to one another.  But I have included one of my own hairs which appears yellow here.  I have both yellow and grey.  The strand of hair shows how thick the 220 SiC scratches are.

There is so much that can be learned from these scratches simply because we know exactly what caused them.  This is what lets us identify the cause of any hidden scratches that we might reveal when we clean the windows.  I will continue to make scratches and send you pictures.  There are other types of damaged glass too.  Such as what happens when a scratch makes contact with different solutions of acids.  Like sulfuric, hydrofluoric, and others.  That will be a lesson in itself! 

This a picture of my little microscope that cost obout fifty bux.  You will need to get something similar so you can begin compiling your own micrographs on your phone.

Written by Henry Grover Jr.

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