Insoluble Material
If your specimen is insoluble, then you’re in the right place! From here, you have to answer the following question: is it small enough to create a microscope slide right now? Chances are, the answer is no, because most rocks and minerals out there are much too big. If it does happen to be small enough, just act as if it is a normal specimen. This tutorial is mostly concerned with getting your rocks/minerals to the proper size. Here’s how to do it:
Step One
Find anything that could scratch your specimen. You try to find things that could scratch based off of the Mohs scale of hardness (which you can look up online). If you can’t find something based on that, you can try to see if you can find the same specimen or see if you can scratch it with a metal tool (tweezers, eating utensils, etc).
Step Two
Over a piece of paper, scratch dust particles off of the specimen with the located scratcher. You would do this over a piece of paper because it’s easier to see dust and easier to clean up.
Step Three
Carefully transport the dust onto a slide
Step Four
Make the slide as you normally would.