Microfossil Slides II : Making Slides

Continuing on from part I of making/mounting microfossil slides - click here -, in this post I'll go through making my own slides and then mounting specimens. The main benefits of making microfossil slides are the the massive decrease in cost compared to commercial slides and the freedom to make bespoke apertures and slide sizes. The final product (below) is, hopefully, a high quality slide that can be made cheaply, without compromising on quality. This was partly inspired by similar instructions into making microfossil slides [5].

The final product.

The microfossil slides are made up of two parts. Firstly there is the slide itself which is made from the backing card, and the top card which contains the aperture. The second part is the slide cover, which is made from a piece of glass, some plain paper and tape.

The first step is making the card elements for the slide. The size depends on the glass slide you'll be using for the slide cover. Mine are 7.5 X 2.5cm, which I believe to be standard. Now, to make a single slide, one can simply cut a piece of mounting card to size using a ruler, craft/utility knife and cutting mat to the required size and this does work well. However, if you're making multiple slides, this quickly becomes tedious and hard to cut perfectly, so instead, consider making a jig.

The jig (below) is made of some mounting card (mount board) and a ruler taped to a cutting mat. The knife runs down the right hand side of the ruler, cutting a perfect slide every time. This greatly reduces the number of erroneous cuts, with only a strip of card (7.5cm width in my case) having to be cut by hand. Another great benefit of using is a jig is that after the initial time investment of making the jig, cards can be cut in a matter of seconds.

The jig- left: the mounting card being inserted from the left into the jig, right: the finished product of cutting using the jig for a minute.

Each slide is made of two bits of card, with one having black paper stuck to one side (this is ran through the jig like any other card as above). Alternatively to black paper, one option is to print out a grid, similar to commercial microfossil slides. This can be effective, though it is difficult to get a high enough print quality on a home inkjet printer, so as a result I opted to go with plain black paper. I'm planning on looking into this some more in the future when lock-down in lifted, perhaps getting slides professionally printed.

The next step is to cut the apertures. I did this through creating a guide with lines drawn on so I didn't have to measure each aperture, however, it doesn't take too long to do otherwise. I experimented using a mount cutter (at 45 and 90 degree cuts), used primarily for cutting picture frame mounts, which didn't work particularly well due to the small size. I also tried both a utility (Stanley) knife and an X-acto knife and found that the X-acto knife was superior, although numerous cuts have to be made to cut through the mounting card.

The black base card, and the top card (some with the apertures cut).

After cutting the slide components, next they are glued together (using a simple glue stick) and left to dry underneath weight, making special care to make sure they are perfectly aligned.

After this has fully cured, the slide cover can then be made to fit the slide. This is done by cutting out a piece of plain printer paper to the correct size. This is the same length as the slide and glass but the width is increased by the thickness of the slide. I quickly made a template on Microsoft Publisher, which could be printed and cut, once again reducing error.
The next step is covering the back of the paper cover with tape. I used brown framer's tape, as it is most aesthetically pleasing and can cover a large area, although masking tape would work just as well.This completely backs the paper cover and extends over the side (approximately 5mm) to cover over the glass slide (below middle image). The excess length can be removed with either scissors or a craft knife and then the cover wrapped around the slide so that the glass covers the top and is secured to the paper with the tape.

Left: the three components, top- the slides formed from the black base and the top piece with aperture cut, after being glued together, middle- the slide cover, bottom- a standard glass slide. Middle: covering back of the slide cover paper with brown framer's tape. Right: the final three components ready for assembly.

At first it takes a bit of adjustment and refinement, but after making a few slide covers it becomes easy to judge how far the tape must extend to reach the glass etc. After the slide cover has been made, the slide can be removed and a section of the cover removed (the triangle on the template seen above) in order to be able to easily remove the slide.

The result of using a jig, printing templates, and working in batches is that a large number of slides can be made relatively quickly and for very little cost.

Approximately the cost of each slide is as follows (assuming 0 wastage):

£0.06/slide for the plain glass slide [1]
£0.02/slide for brown framer's tape [2]
£0.03/slide for mount board [3]
(+ a few pence for black paper and printer paper)

What the above list shows that if you were to want to make large quantities of slides, the cost is minimal, realistically being no more than 20p/slide, considerably less than £3.54 [4]- the price of commercial microfossil slides.

Made up slides.

After making the slides, next comes mounting. Below are some of the homemade microfossil slides I've completed, as well as mounted modern specimens.

Assorted microfossils from four localities (all from the Alston Group), representing similar assemblages, with some subtle differences.

Slides of modern specimens, from otter scat and barn owl pellets.

Modern foraminifera (Hollocene) mounted on a commercial size, and a home-made slide.

I also wanted to experiment with apertures and size- pushing this format further. Using the glass from an old picture frame, I cut it into 8.5 X 7.5cm rectangles using a glass cutter (below).

Cutting glass.

I then went through the same process as with my other slides, albeit at at a larger scale.

7.5 X 8.5cm slides: left: slide cover, middle: slide, right: made-up slide.

A triple apertured slide of echinoid fragments.

As well as making new slides, I went on to push the format further into an artistic medium, similar to foraminifera mounted slides [6] and other Victorian age microscopic designs.