BTW I should probably mention like most here I do this at my home and out of pocket, so don't have the luxury of a lab and proper budget.mawyatt wrote:Smokedaddy,
Thanks, I have been looking at something similar. The one you identified has a 2mm thread pitch, whereas the Stackshot rail has a 1.59mm pitch, and the Wemacro has a 1mm pitch.
However now I am not so convinced these industrial grade rails are that much better than the ones that Stackshot or maybe Wemacro offer, especially with the off axis tension concept mentioned. They will handle a larger load, and have more travel, but may not be much better in short movement uniformity with little image shift. I don't require precise location, nor repeatability but do require very little image shift.
Johan at Extreme Macro evaluated the Wemacro system, and Beatsy has posted some very nice images at 1 micron steps. These confirm that 1 micron steps are possible with these rails, but I may require tighter control of image shifts that they do because of my chip subjects.
I am shooting at 20X with 2 micron steps as shown here and will be going to 50X at 1 micron steps soon, so any image shift will just get amplified more.
If I had the $, or my company would pay, I would just get a really precise expensive rail...but that is not the case.
Anyway, thanks for the pointer, if you find a 1mm pitch rail please let me know.
Best,
Mike
MJKZZ (Peter) is looking into these eBay industrial rails in another thread, and posting his progress with his new setup which si quite nice I might add!