Tiver,
I tried to read through it but the article Is 10 years old and most of the links are dead ends. Is there a finished product that works with valid links?
Probably not. The thread ended up running off the rails a little.
Here is an
Inspection PDF from Shure Even this isn't as helpful as one would like. Focus, lighting, perspective and orientation are critical to seeing the wear marks. It's easy to over or under estimate wear if the stylus isn't looked at just right.
The setup is not difficult to get together. I have a simple laboratory microscope and 2 desk lamps. One lamp for each side.
This kind of lamp
or similar
I looked on ebay and see there are used student scopes that should work.
Copy paste this - " Parco Student Microscope " - into google and several ebay listings should pop up
This is just an example that might work. One challenge is having enough room on the object table. Most of these scopes are made for slides. Styli and cartridges are bulkier and if the distance between the lens and the object table can't be made great enough to accommodate what one wants to look at, then it won't work.
Here is a picture of one that came up that looks like it has a fair bit of available space. Notice that the microscope body moves up and down to focus. Some only move the object table up and down to focus and thereby can't accommodate objects much thicker than slides.
There are also small hand held USB camera scopes. They can provide interesting pictures, but getting useful wear info from them is a challenge I haven't figured out yet. Here is a stylus shot from one that cost about $20 on Amazon.
From the top....this is an unused Shure Hyper Elliptical. This is approaching the possibility to evaluate wear, but we shouldn't be persuaded into thinking so just yet.
This is a picture from a cell phone through the lens of the lab scope I have (not the above stylus). This shows reflective wear facets, but they can be deceiving and need to be looked at from a couple different perspectives or foci.
Same stylus as above with a little different lighting and focus
The first picture makes the stylus look worse than the second one. That's why I go back and look several times. I don't want to mistake moderately worn from heavily worn.
That is really all it takes to get started. Once you have the pieces, it's just about getting a little experience with the views, focus and lighting. I have found many of the styli I get on used tables have only moderate wear. A couple were very minor wear. Some were toast.