Processors, masks and micro beads

Friday - Today was the last day, for the final preparations before the Cambridge Open Studios tomorrow. All the written material that had been generated yesterday needed to be printed out and the pile of written material accumulated on my desk.

This delayed somewhat my departure for the meeting of the Huntingdonshire Business Network, for which I usually permitted at least an hour's travelling time due to the unpredictability of the A 14. It was therefore with considerable surprise that I found myself arriving in Huntingdon on time despite having departed a mere 25 min beforehand. Today's meeting was more of a conversazione, with a number of members having been away on holiday and we just generally catching up on the news. I had also taken along by stereo microscope so that Mr Howell could view the sound sample that he had brought back for me from the Greek island. It also afforded an opportunity to show the other members the lack of detail in the course reproduction of a fake one pound coin.

Progressing onto Mr Beal in Over, the usual Tutor cloud meeting had been deferred due to family circumstances preventing the ladies from attending. However Mr Beal's eyes lit up when I informed him of the presence of a microscope in the car. Mr Beal was battling with the difficult technical issue. For some time now Mr Beal had been purchasing laptops on eBay and repairing them. One of the issues was to reapply sold to the microchips that formed the core of the laptops processor.

In theory the principle was extremely simple. A mask would be oriented over the processor and minute beads of solder would be filled into the mask and then adhered to the processor itself. The practical reality however was a completely different issue. The mask had to be aligned to within the fraction of a millimetre, and also had to be a set height above the processor, so that a single solder bead would fall through the aperture.
Due to the submillimetre size of the solder beads, these were very prone to picking up a static electrical charge that would cause some adjacent pairs of beads to club together. The beads were held onto the processor after having been applied by virtue of thin smear of adhesive. We found that during the heating process, conviction occurred in the liquefied film of the adhesive, resulting in small ridges of liquid that moved the beads across the processor, again causing clumping. We spent a good two hours establishing the facts and practising adjusting the settings to minimise all the complications.

This left a scant 15 min for Mr Beal to inform me of the changes to my website that he had undertaken and how I might myself and new articles and corrections to the same.

Returning back home, my mind was still on the next days open studio. A number of the visitors from previous open Studios have been students who wish to know more about the motivation and background and technicalities of photography through the microscope and how this could be presented in an artistic manner. I thought that I could therefore prepare a short description of the process in advance that the students could take with them, providing them with suitable information for their school projects and minimising the post open studio work that might come my way. The writing and printing off of 10 copies took until late into the evening.

The anticipation of the next days opening of the studio also delayed my getting to sleep.