The Floor Plan
What's on the bench, and what each piece actually does.
Visiting inspectors ask this often enough that we put it on its own page. Nothing here is proprietary. Most of it is twenty years old and works fine.
Shop diagram
One bay, 1,800 sq ft, tall north window on the long wall. The coffee pot is not to scale.
Tools of the trade
Diamond sectioning blade, 10"
Resin-bonded, for mild and low-alloy steel. We swap blades by application — there's a separate one for stainless and a finer one for weld coupons thinner than 3mm. One blade per quarter, roughly. We keep the worn ones for rougher cuts.
Bakelite mount press
Hot-mounting press, 30mm die. Phenolic resin for standard work, conductive filler when we need to run the sample under a SEM later (we farm that out). Each puck gets case-numbered on the back with a vibrating scribe before it leaves the press.
Two-wheel polisher
Grit progression: 240 → 400 → 600 → 1200 SiC, then 6µm and 1µm diamond on cloth. Pris can tell from across the bench when somebody's skipped a step. You cannot, in fact, skip a step — the 600 pulls out what the 400 missed, every time.
Vickers micro-hardness tester
Loads HV0.5 through HV10. This is what runs the HAZ traverses you see on the cover article. Calibrated against test blocks at the start of every shift — we log the drift in a notebook that dates back to 2012. If the log is off by more than 5 HV we stop and recheck the indenter.
Optical microscope (inverted)
Inverted stage, 50× through 1000× objectives, reflected light. Older than it looks. A replacement filar eyepiece went in two years ago after the original cracked when somebody — who will not be named — set a mount down hard. The photomicrograph tube shoots to a digital back.
Etch hood & reagent cabinet
Dedicated fume hood with a flammables cabinet underneath. Standing reagents: 2% and 5% nital for carbon and low-alloy steels, Kalling's No. 2 for stainless, Murakami's for carbides, 10% oxalic for grain-boundary sensitization checks. We mix in small batches — dated and initialed on the bottle.
Also on the bench but not worth a diagram: a Charpy impact tester borrowed permanently from a shop that closed in 2014, a dial caliper Dell has owned since 1997, three loupes, a UV lamp for dye-penetrant demonstrations during the apprentice workshops, and a coffee-can full of heat-tint coupons we keep around for teaching purposes.