Mechanical abrasion has been used by the authors to prepare a variety of materials, mainly ceramics, which have been thinned to electron transparency. The basic premise of this technique is the rotation of a spherically shaped wood tool at right angles to a rotating 3mm specimen disk (∼100 μm thick). A slurry of 1/2 μm diamond powder in a glycerin vehicle thins the specimen and carries away the abraded matter. In addition to the wood tool other materials such as brass, teflon and polyethylene have been tried without success. Abrasion “marks” left on the thin specimen surface can be ignored in some situations or removed by a touch up ion milling at 3 keV for ∼1/2 hr. Recently, attempts to thin N+ implanted Al from the un-implanted side using a wood tool were found to be extremely time consuming, i.e. 60 hr or more. It was found that a spherical stainless steel tool produced a suitably thin transmission electron microscopy (TEM) specimen using glycerin as the vehicle and no diamond powder. Depending upon the pressure applied to the tool these specimens could be thinned in as little as 3 hr. The turning marks left by the lathe tool proved to be sufficient to thin the soft aluminum. From this result It appears that soft tools will thin hard materials and hard tools can be used to thin soft materials efficiently. A number of other specimens recently prepared using mechanical microthinning will also be presented.