Saturday, April 28, 2012

Microscoping Thera Band Gold

OK, after the successful but a bit silly "office supplies weapons", back to science.


I always wanted to microscope rubber, and found a cheap but powerful microscope on amazon.

See the product on amazon.com


It has an LCD screen and can save pics and vids to an SD card, it even has a USB port.


When it arrived, I first tested it with some of the preparates that came with the product.

Leg of housefly at 400x:


Onion, at 200x and 400x:


Pine wood, at 10x, 100x and 400x:



My own blood, at 400x up to 1600x:



Not so bad!

So I went along and made two preparations, one from stretched rubber and one from relaxed rubber. I had to put the stretched rubber between two pieces of scotch tape so it would stay stretched, of course.



The result is stunning! See the coiled up fibres (those can't be the polymers, you need an atomic microscope to see those):



Now see the stretched TB Gold, again in various zoom factors (the last one is 1600x):








Posted by The Slingshot Channel at 11:18 AM

2 comments:

  1. Lord RobereApril 28, 2012 at 11:18 PM

    Outstanding! I've never seen this before, but the structure is similar to my very hazy thoughts of the internal structure of rubber with all the material being aggressively coiled together. Thank you for the images that will help us understand rubber better. -- Would dyeing the rubber reveal more info with inconsistent penetration of the dye?

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  2. AnonymousJune 21, 2012 at 12:28 PM

    heey,

    witch colour thera band would you recomment me i'm 15 years old and a beginner in slingshot and i try to make my own slingshot

    thanx

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