News

Honing Plates (Sharpening Stones)
September 26, 2023Hone plates, or sharpening stones, are used to produce a fine edge on knives, scissors, and other tools. A kit of stones provides progressively finer grit sizes and spacings to

How Do We Define “Roughness?”
September 13, 2023“Roughness” can mean a lot of things, but in surface texture analysis, it has a very specific meaning. In this short video we look at how 2D and 3D surface

Average Roughness
July 31, 2023If you rely on average roughness (Ra) to control your surfaces, check out this short animation. It shows that very different surfaces can all have the same Ra value…and Ra

Friction and the Real Area of Contact
July 25, 2023If I need to push a long, heavy block, it seems like it should be easier if I stand the block up rather than laying it flat on its face…and

Dashboard surface texture
July 7, 2023When you’re thinking about the most engineered surfaces in a car, you may think of cylinder bores, clutches, brakes, etc. But we’d like to put one more item on your

Cavitation erosion
June 22, 2023Cavitation is the formation of air bubbles in a fluid as it goes from high pressure to low pressure. The dissolved gas can grow into bubbles—and under certain conditions those

Why do some bearings look shiny with wear?
April 25, 2023We tend to think of “new” surfaces as shiny and smooth, and “worn” surfaces as rough, dull, or uneven. But for a bearing surface, the opposite is often true: the

Visualizing “filtering” — an animation
April 18, 2023Surface texture can be described as a spectrum of spatial wavelengths. “Filtering” is the process to isolate the wavelengths that matter for our application. But what does that really look

Register for the Spring “Roughness, Texture, and Tribology” class and workshop
December 5, 2022Registration is open for the Roughness, Texture, and Tribology class and workshop, which will be held in Livonia, Michigan, May 3–5. 2023. This live, in-person class offers a unique opportunity to learn

A little tribology every morning
September 13, 2022Years ago, I’d just completed one of my first major surface roughness measurement projects, and I was considering my next steps to form an actual business. I thought that I