Method development, consumable selection, laboratory setup and troubleshooting for laboratories that prepare and test metal. The half of the business that makes the catalogue worth reading.

Sample-preparation method development

A preparation method is a sequence of surfaces, abrasives, loads, speeds and times, and it is
specific to the material and to what you need to see. A method that produces a clean surface on a
wrought alloy will pull the graphite out of a cast iron and relieve the phases in a duplex steel.

Where a manufacturer publishes a method for your material, the work is adapting it to your
machine, your sample size and your acceptance criteria. Where none is published — a
coating, a composite, an unusual joint — it is developing one and documenting it so it can
be repeated by whoever runs it next.

The preparation guides show the published half of that work for eight
material classes.

Consumable selection against a standard

If your work is bound by a standard — a nodularity count, an inclusion rating, a case
depth, a coating thickness or porosity measurement — then the standard constrains the
preparation, and the preparation constrains what you buy. Selection starts from the measurement
rather than from a catalogue page.

Setting up a laboratory

What a new metallography laboratory needs, in what order, and what can wait. Cutting, mounting,
grinding and polishing, and the consumables that each machine will run through. The commonest
expensive mistake is equipment bought before the methods it will run are decided, because the
methods determine the platen size, the head speed range and the fixturing — and every one
of those decides which consumables fit.

Troubleshooting

A preparation that used to work and has stopped. Scratches that will not clear, relief at a
phase boundary, pull-out, embedded abrasive, edge rounding, staining after polishing. These
usually have a small number of causes, and the fastest route to the cause is normally the
sequence and the consumable condition rather than the machine.

How it is engaged

How an engagement is set up depends on which of the above you need — a method to develop, a laboratory to specify, or a problem to diagnose. Tell us which, and we will tell you how it would work and what it would involve before anything is committed.

What we can say without qualification: nothing in a consulting conversation is conditioned on
buying anything, and where the answer is “the consumable you have is correct and the method
is not”, that is the answer you get.

What this is not

We are not a testing laboratory. We do not run your samples, issue test reports or certify
results, and we do not audit laboratories for accreditation. Where you need a result rather than
a method, that is a different kind of supplier and we will say so.

Sources

P2 Industrial trade licence and free-zone registration — Dubai Integrated Economic Zones (DIEZ). Stated on About.
Sourcing policy, and what P2 is not — this site, and How we verify.
Everything about a product, its figures and its documents: the product page, which cites the manufacturer document and page for each row.

Laboratory consulting