AbstractRecently we have been making extensive use of TEM observations of grain boundaries in a research program concerned with the deformation behavior of tungsten bicrystals. A major problem in this research involved the preparation of thin foils which contained the grain boundary in the electron tranparent region, since standard cell type electrojetpolishing techniques do not allow adequate control of the placement of the thin area. Since the grain boundary comprises a very small percentage of a foil, good thin area placement control is critical to obtaining useful samples consistently. Masking techniques which use electrically insulating lacquers are not precise enough to guarantee the position of the thin area. However, we have found that one can use the dishing characteristic of the jetpolisher (i.e., the fact that the center of the foil thins faster than the perimeter) in conjunction with the masking technique to predict the position of the thin area within a preferentially thinned region created by the masking procedure outlined below. This is the essence of the procedure outlined below.