I am in the watchmaking profession, and recently discovered a type of gear used in some watches that has individually sprung teeth, which allows the teeth to mesh together perfectly and prevent any kind of dead space or play (known in the industry as backlash), making for smoother and more accurate timing.
Because of how small a scale we’re talking about here (each tooth being only fraction of a mm long, and the whole wheel maybe 7mm/¼inch wide and 0.5mm/20thou thick at most), you need to use a special manufacturing method called LIGA, as more typical methods aren’t precise enough. However, when I looked into it more as I was curious on how they do it, all of the material I found was extremely technical and wordy, and way above my level (I got a C on my physics GCSE; I fix watches good but science no am do well).
Such terms as X-ray lithography and low Z carriers are beyond my scope, yet my curiosity remains unsated, so it is thus I beseech you for answers, that I might know peace from the unyielding turmoil I now face.
Cheers.
In: 6
First lets look at regular photolithography, like the kind they use to make integrated circuits. You coat your workpiece with a light sensitive photoresist, and shine light on it through a pattern. This lets you remove the mask from where you want to make a change, but leave it in place over the parts you want to stay the same. You can then add material, remove material, or otherwise change the area you’ve left bare, and then chemically remove the photoresist so that part is left unchanged.
x-ray lithography is the same, except it uses light with higher energy, and needs different materials to work. The low z materials are transparent to x-rays, while high-z materials are opaque. These would be used to construct the mask you shine the light through to get the desired pattern..
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