[Marc] So, today, a little bit of a different video, because Eric has made a book.
So you sliced components through, and you got so good at it that you made a book of
the pictures?
[Eric] That's right!
Let's take a look at some parts here.
[Marc] So you slice through resistors.
[Eric] More resistors.
[Marc] Yeah, it starts with resistors, then it gets more and more involved.
But even resistors are impressive.
[Eric] Capacitors.
Some other good ones: polymer chip capacitors, transformers.
Oh look, a rectifier bridge!
Got some chips in here.
More modern chips.
These are very complicated inside.
Some sensors, ambient light sensor, image sensors.
Motors, connectors.
And cables too.
[Marc] Yeah, even cables are beautiful.
[Eric] Yeah, I really enjoyed the cable section.
That has got some fascinating subjects in it.
And then, of course, we have a whole section here on retro tech.
[Marc] Yes!
[Eric] Vacuum tube.
[Marc] That's got to be one of my favorites, you cut through a CRT.
[Eric] Camera flash bulb, CdS cell, some older integrated circuits.
[Marc] Oh, µA702.
The alternate reality, the IBM SLT.
[Eric] MSLTs.
Very complex multi-layer circuit boards like this.
[Marc] Yeah I love this one.
[Eric] microSD card.
Did you know it has a circuit board inside it?
[Marc] And I didn't know the chip went from here, all the way to there.
[Eric] One end see the other end.
[Marc] Yeah, don't bend it!
[Eric] So this is of course the cover photo here, where there's the cross section of the
smartphone circuit board, where you can see that it's a very three-dimensional structure.
Lots and lots of layers.
Another good one, this isolation amplifier.
It's just a work of art.
[Marc] It's so beautiful.
[Eric] So we have some close-up photos of that, which are just breathtaking.
And then, we also have an entire section on here on how we did it.
[Marc] And I shot a little video on how you did it.
That's where we're going to go to after that.
Those of you who follow the channel are familiar with Eric, who repaired our ailing IBM PS/2
using his magic finger, and a great deal of expertise.
He is a repeat offender when it comes to crazy retro electronics projects.
He is the creator of the MOnSter 6502, a fully working replica of the 6502 processor made
out of real transistors.
In the same vein, he and Evil Mad Scientist created this extra large version of the 555
timer, which you can buy in a kit.
When he’s not on this channel, he chronicles his electronics adventures on Twitter, where
he’s known as TubeTime.
And that’s where it all started, when he got curious about a failed Tantalum capacitor,
and wanted to see if he could find the cause by looking inside.
He could not see an obvious failure, but the picture was a hit, and that got him started
slicing into all sorts of electronics components.
He teamed up once again with talented photographer and entrepreneur Windell Oskay from Evil Mad
Scientist, and after years of work, the result is this book.
To learn more about it, I went to interview Eric and Windell at Evil Mad Scientist’s
headquarters.
[Windell] Hello!
[Marc] Hello!
Well, this looks very promising.
I see some of your projects, your common projects, the NE555.
So this is Windell and this is Eric.
And you have the monster 6502.
We have Maxi and mini versions.
[Windell] Yes we have the DIP and SOIC versions.
[Marc] This was my first time at Evil Mad Scientist labs, so Windell gave me a short
tour first.
[Windell] This is our manufacturing workshop.
[Marc] So Windell designed this modern rendition of an HP pen plotter, which he builds right
here.
People use it mostly for artistic endeavors nowadays.
You just plop it down over the paper, connect it to a modern computer, and away you draw.
[Windell] So this is the base for the SCA3 that I just showed you.
And it's milled from a big solid block of aluminum.
[Marc] But let's go back to our book.
[Eric] It actually started out as a repair project.
So, I had a broken piece of test equipment, and during the troubleshooting process, I
discovered that there was a tantalum capacitor that had failed in a short circuit.
And so I thought, well, why don't I try cutting it in half, to see if it looks different than
a normal tantalum.
[Marc] Yeah, you want to know why it failed.
[Eric] Right, exactly, failure analysis.
[Marc] And then, you made an incredible picture of it.
Can you can you show it?
[Eric] Yes.
So this is actually a not the same tantalum capacitor.
I couldn't see a burn mark or anything that looked like a failure, but it looked really
interesting inside.
And so, I put the photo up on Twitter.
And everyone else thought it was really really interesting.
And that kind of kicked off the whole thing, because then I started taking other parts
and cutting those in half, and putting those pictures on Twitter.
[Windell] If you want to show off this one that's in the photograph here...
[Marc] And how did you manage to cut it?
[Eric] Believe it or not, this is cut using sandpaper.
So I just take the intact part and take a piece of sandpaper, a pretty rough grit, and
then just start sanding.
[Marc] So then you guys went sort of crazy, and started to cut through everything.
So this is a quartz crystal.
Which I didn't know, actually, was a tuning fork when it's really low frequency.
[Windell] It's very literally a tuning fork.
It's a carbon film resistor.
It has at its center a ceramic rod that is tumble finished.
And it's coated with a carbon film,.
And they saw this helical spiral cut through the film to make a long track of carbon.
This is a 15 turn trimmer potentiometer.
[Marc] How the freaking hell did you cut through that without breaking it?
[Eric] Very slowly with sandpaper!
[Marc] Sandpaper too?
[Eric] Yeah.
[Marc] So you go through a whole bunch of capacitors.
This one is really neat.
[Windell] The hardest part of this one, was that we wanted to find a capacitor where you
could actually see the layers in the cross section.
And many of these have thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of layers in a package
this size.
[Eric] That was one of your favorites.
[Windell] Yeah, this was one of my favorites.
[Eric] I like it too.
[Windell] Yeah, and we may actually use this as one that we show you how this saw cut is
made.
So this was cut on our low speed diamond saw.
These layers of polyester plastic that are plated on sides with a aluminized polyester,
which is also just called mylar usually.
This is an inductor.
And the context picture for this is actually on the floppy drive from an Apple IIc computer.
[Marc] Oh, this is a very noble inductor!
[Eric] It is!
And a lot of these boards, that we use for context photos, came out of my vintage computer
collection.
[Marc] And then you go over to the active and that's the 1N4002, the most common of
diodes.
And that's so pretty inside!
[Windell] And there's this black case that's filled with little bits of silica, that you
can see inside.
[Marc] And the Silicon dye is sandwiched in the middle, right?
[Eric] Right there in the middle.
And it's got a little bit of silicone on either side to kind of seal it in there.
It's part of the manufacturing process.
[Windell] This was a really, really tough subject.
And we did a lot of tries cutting this.
The inductors don't want to stay together as you cut it.
And we cut this with a diamond saw.
It's a really neat one, because this particular inductor turns out to have five different
diameters of wire on its windings.
You can see them all when you look inside.
[Marc] It's just fantastic.
[Windell] Hey, red LED, right here!
[Windell] This is actually one of those cases where using the sandpaper and great care and
patience really pays off, that you can cut something to exactly the right depth.
[Eric] I had to sand it, and then look at it under a microscope, and then kind of adjust
where I was putting pressure on the part.So I just sand through just the parts that I
want, and get the angle just right, so the bond wire is intact.
And that's how I did it.
[Marc] But enough talking, let's cut through a few in the lab.
Eric and Windell will demonstrate the two techniques, with the slow speed diamond saw
and with sanding,
[Windell] And here we are.
[Eric] This is a vintage carbon composition resistor.
[Marc] Go for it!
[Eric] All right!
[Windell] I got the flat fingernails many times!
[Eric] And we're starting to get through to the inner layer here.
It's probably close enough.
[Marc] Yeah, I was expecting it to go through it, in like two seconds.
But no!
[Windell] It's the low speed saw.
It does its thing.
[Eric] I'll put a little bit of that on there.
Let's wet sand it.
[Marc] Oh, isopropyl alcohol, not water, for wet sanding.
I didn't know that trick!
[Eric] I think I'm ready to go to a finer grit.
Next one we'll probably go 2500, and then we'll go up from there.
[Marc] The book all together, how long have you been working on it?
[Eric] Ever since 2019.
[Marc] So, three years of polishing!
[Eric] This is 7000 grit.
So we're gonna try to get this as smooth as we can.
[Marc] And while we were not looking, it jumped off.
[Windell] I did a rush job of mounting this sample and the beeswax came off of the aluminum
I probably should have cleaned the aluminum first.
[Marc] Oh well, no cut through capacitor this time.
But we'll soldier on with the resistor.
[Windell] It's usually a trade off between focusing and moving the actual part.
And then, we want to get the reflection in view.
[Marc] Well, here we go!
[WIndell] Okay, not terrible.
Actually let's try that color too.
I love this red background in certain things.
Nah.
Okay.
And we don't quite have enough focus on this.
We're a little out of focus on the back here.
So let's go ahead and do a focus stack of it.
[Marc] Focus stacking is a method of obtaining greater depth of focus by taking several pictures
of the object by moving the camera a tiny amount each time, then combining the resulting
pictures sharpest regions in a final image.
Windell designed this robotic camera translator to move the camera precisely between each
picture.
Many of the pictures in the book where obtained this way.
And here is the final focus stacked picture.
You can imagine it takes a great deal of effort to make a book full of these.
[Marc] You get to see the grains and everything.
[Windell] Yeah, that really pops now.
[Marc] And I even got to see the cut through CRT, which is from a vintage video camera
viewfinder.
They had to take it apart and cut every part separately, then put it all back together.
Finally, I had given them one of my failed HP 9825 LED displays, and asked them if they
could take a good picture of it - because this is the best I could muster.
And look what came out!
Anyhow, you get it, I think Eric and Windell are very talented, and I’ll put a link for
the electronic or the hard cover book in the doodly-doo, if you ever fancy getting your
own copy.
See you in the next episode!