Building Prototypes Dan Gelbart part 1 of 18 Introduction

Nice, thanks for sharing this. His Youtube series about "Building Prototypes" looks interesting: [VIDEO] Here is a bio about Dr. Daniel Gelbart: [LINK]

Thanks, first time I've heard of them, will be going through those (they seem to be available at archive.org [0]) soon! I'd like to point out another interesting 18-part series of videos about prototyping (in his words "a short course on how to build stuff" :)), by engineer/inventor/professor Dan Gelbart: [1] [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]

It sounds like you need to add a "stage" to help position your sample. Flexures are systems that bend to perform motion, and can do surprising things that you can't do with joined together machined pieces. Here's an open source stage project using flexures that will likely help [LINK] Also, see Dan Gelbart's 18 video series about building prototypes [VIDEO]

There is "Building Prototypes" [1] series by Dan Gelbart on YouTube which is pure gold for anybody that wants to learn how building mechanical things, mostly precision/instrumentation things. Part 12 for plastic forming and casting. [1] [VIDEO]