Adam McCombs

Isabel Burgos

About Us

We are obsessive electron (and ion) microscope hackers and maintainers working to enable more people  to truly own these systems. Through freely shared information and resourceful engineering we want to open the way for exploration by teaching old microscopes new tricks and microscope owners new skills.

We started in this field from a place of discovery, getting a vintage system on eBay and spending the next 8 months in the garage figuring out how to get a beam and then an image. As we found the rest of the electron microscope community we realized that our unrestricted approach to working with microscopes (backed by our skills as engineers and hackers) was filling needs for people who wanted to deviate at all from the yellow brick road of microscope design, modification, use, and ownership laid out by OEMs.

We have worked *successfully* on microscopes from every major OEM (JEOL, Hitachi, ISI, Philips, FEI, Zeiss, Tescan, Amray) and every vintage (1960s to today). We feel at home with SEMs, TEMs, FIBs, and any other combination of beams and coils. Field work also exposed us to the wide variety of workflows that exist around EMs.

In 2021 we took the leap from being 2 engineers with Pelican cases doing the best work we could to customers systems in the field to getting our own 2000 sqft workshop and imaging lab. This gives us the space to take on rebuild and customization projects with bigger scopes (pun intended) than ever before. Our ceiling is 27’, your 300kv JEOL monster TEM from the 90s is welcome. We also have built our digital fabrication capabilities, giving us the resources to produce custom tooling and workstations for problems related to electron microscope use and manufacturing. From custom laminar flow sample loading stations, to high voltage cable manufacturing we have endeavored to embed the operational intelligence we gather physically into the tools we make.