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Scott writes:

See the meteorite in the first picture? Next to the scale cube? No, wait, the scale cube is the meteorite!

I’ve always wondered why meteorite photos include scale cubes made from aluminum, wood or tungsten carbide. Why not use scale cubes made from the meteorites we love? The answer of course is because they didn’t seem to exist… until now! As an experiment, I picked Tsarev for its dark color and Seymchan as a stable iron — no fun if your scale cubes rusts easily! I wanted meteorite content in the markings as well, so for the white "paint", some inexpensive aubrite crumbles were ground up, and for black "paint", dark bits of NWA 869 did the trick. The cubes were first lasered for the legends and then hand painted. The Seymchan cube weights 8 grams and the Tsarev cubes average 3.4 grams each, and all are 10.0mm wide. Not perfect looking, but hey, they are truly meteoritic scale cubes!

Pic 1 is the Seymchan cube next to nothing!

Pic 2 shows the Seymchan cube with three Tsarev cubes.

Pic 3 is of the three Tsarev cubes.

Pic 4 is the Seymchan cube posing on a CV3 (Allende).

Pic 5 is a group photo on Allende.

Pic 6 is the group with a conventional tungsten carbide scale cube.

Photos may be freely used with attribution.

Many thanks to Serge Afanasyev of CometShopNew.com for machining the near-perfect 10mm cubes of Tsarev and Seymchan, and to Rex and Mary Scates of ScaleObjects.com for the lasering and painting! They would probably help you make a scale cube of your own, and I might be persuaded to part with one or two of the Tsarev cubes shown.

  Click to view larger photos     #1     #2     #3     #4     #5     #6