The prep recipes your lab has tuned, in one recipe book.
Indexed by alloy, hardness, and mount type. Draft, under-validation, and approved states. Apply a recipe to a sample in one tap and every run is recorded against the recipe.
Recipes that travel with the lab, not with one technician.
A central recipe book means the senior technician's hard-won procedure is queryable by alloy and hardness, not buried in a Word doc on her laptop. New hires inherit the lab's know-how on day one.
Indexed by alloy, hardness, and mount type
A recipe is searchable by the things a metallographer actually thinks about: 4140 at HRC 42 in a hot-mount Bakelite puck, not 'protocol_v3_revised.docx.' Find the right ladder for the sample on the bench in seconds.
Draft, under validation, approved
Every recipe carries a validation state. Drafts are visible to the lab and labeled as drafts. Under-validation recipes are runnable but flagged for review. Approved recipes are surfaced first in pickers. Status is a ranking signal, not a hard filter, so a new lab still gets value before its recipes are blessed.
One-tap apply
Pick a recipe on a sample and the prep ladder pre-fills: mount, grind, polish, etch steps, all the parameters the recipe specifies. The technician can still tweak any step at the bench, and the deviation is captured in the run.
Every run, logged
Each application of a recipe to a sample is a recipe attempt. The lab can see how often a recipe is run, what gets tweaked, and which alloys it actually performs on. Recipes earn validation through use.
Vendor-neutral parameter shape
Recipes describe abrasive class, grit, force, and time, not specific consumable SKUs. A recipe authored on PACE consumables runs on Buehler or Struers consumables that meet the same spec, because the recipe is in the parameters, not the brand.
Bring the lab's existing recipes in
Author recipes the way they already exist in the lab's documentation. Materials Prep ships empty so the recipes are the lab's recipes, not a generic seed set. Coming soon: a Phase 2 marketplace where labs can publish recipes globally for other labs to adopt.
Common questions about the recipe book.
- Does Materials Prep ship with a recipe book?
- No. Materials Prep ships empty on purpose, so a lab's recipes are the recipes. The Metallographic Handbook and the optional Metallogic AI add-on give you a strong starting point for authoring recipes from scratch, but the recipe book you end up with belongs to your lab.
- Who can edit a recipe?
- Lab admins and technicians can author and edit recipes. Viewers are read-only. Every change is recorded in the audit log with the actor, timestamp, and before/after snapshot.
- Can a recipe be private to me, scoped to my lab, or shared across the org?
- Yes. Every recipe has an explicit visibility scope: private, lab, org, or global. Default is lab. Global recipes opt into sharing the full prep ladder publicly, which is the foundation for the Phase 2 recipe marketplace.
- What happens when a recipe is deleted?
- Soft delete. The recipe is hidden from the application but still recoverable, and the prior runs against it remain attached to their samples. Hard deletion is on request and described on the trust page.
- Can recipes link to specific consumables or equipment?
- Yes. Each step can reference a consumable class (pad, abrasive, lubricant) and your lab's catalogued equipment. The reference is loose — a recipe written against a 9 µm diamond on a Trident pad runs against any equivalent pad your lab stocks.
Pairs with etchants, batches, atlas, and Metallogic AI for AI-drafted recipes.
Your lab's prep recipes, finally in one place.
Free to try. No setup call required.