Over the years, it has become more apparent to me that a lot of people do not know how to look at photos from a microscope.

A common source of confusion in doing a failure analysis is figuring out how strong the material was supposed to be.

One service contract that came from a company with a promising used scope was really good ... for them.

In my business, I have decided that I won’t even call it a failure/mistake unless I lose $1,000 (assuming nobody was injured).

Since we started this series of posts, we have been focused on providing information on how we can learn to better see what is out there so that we can understand the interactions between different aspects of reality.

Now, the burning question: Where did the crack start?

So now we have come to the task of looking for features that might tell us how the crack happened on the shaft.

Having primed my neurons from the exercise discussed last time, I am now going to take a look at a photo of a fracture surface that I have not looked at in some time.

Since I have not seen any brave souls posting results of the looking-around exercise, I did it myself … from my desk at work.