To Chris Mohr, Oystein and others who may be still interested:
If you have not noticed: in
Oystein's blog, there is a discussion with two truthers.
One of them,
Poseidon, is perhaps only "semi-truther", he is qualified and educated and a debate with him is basically fruitful and interesting. He accepted Laclede paint as the material of red-gray chips (a) to (d) and he has "only" problem to accept that no CD of WTC was performed at all.
The second truther is
Anonym alias
Ziggy (banned now in The911Forum), who is really very tough and devoted "nanotruther". After thorough "discussion" with him, it is again quite clear that microspheres visible on burned chips and shown in Fig. 20 (Bentham paper) are still the "weapons of the last resort" - and not only to him. And we should admit that the formation of these microspheres has not been fully explained by any debunker so far (although several hypotheses were proposed). Ziggy basically objects that no paper exists in which the formation of similar microspheres was described in similar paint or material after heating to 700 degrees C in air.
Here, only further experiments on genuine red-gray chips from WTC dust can be helpful, to convince some more (well… few) truthers. I know well that it is not necessary or so, but let me just think about it again.
Oystein has pointed many times (not only during discussion with Ziggy) that it does not make sense to replicate DSC measurement and to look for microspheres after heating, since Bentham team forgot to inform us what was the original composition/appearance of chips heated in DSC machine.
Still, I would say that if Laclede primer chips prevail among red-gray chips investigated by both Harrit and Millette (which we do not know but it can be reasonably expected) , basically all burned chips shown in Fig. 20 can be Laclede paint. In all of them, microspheres were formed, and it seems to be improbable that in several different primer paints, the same/very similar microspheres can be formed.
Therefore, I think that the “mystery” of spheres could be solved, if Jim Millette heats some chips with the composition/structure corresponding to Laclede primer and looks if some spheres are created. Here, I would choose some chips, for which XEDS indicating Laclede was measured on cross-sections. No DSC device is needed, just some oven and a good microscope. Such additional experiments would be simple and cheap.
Here I would like to repeat what I think about these spheres.
First of all, we have no real proof that they are really iron–rich in sense that they mostly contain significantly less of oxygen than iron oxides (except Fig. 21). They can be generally just spheres of iron oxides contaminated with several stuffs from the paint and/or chip surface contaminants.
Sunstealer thinks that they are not formed from the paint itself, but basically from the gray layers of attached rusted steel. And he can be easily right, since gray layers are “missing” in Fig. 20 and, instead, just those spheres are seen. Problem is that melting of iron oxides from gray layers is not really expected at such temperature (I think). At higher temperatures above 500 degrees C, iron oxides can form some lower-melting eutectics with paint pigments (in the case of Laclede with metakaolin formed from kaolinite), but frankly, I have not found any such eutectic in the literature so far. E.g.
here, all eutectics of iron oxides and aluminosilicates seem to melt above ca 900 degrees. Of course, my literature search was far from completion and perhaps I simply do not understand how such mixtures of inorganics can behave on microscopic level. Moreover, according to Fig. 25, spheres contain additional elements /stuffs, which can further decrease the melting temperature. Also, we cannot exclude the possibility that spheres are formed from the paint itself.
Notably, Henryco did not find any new spheres in his chips heated up to 900 degrees C, but he found some objects with metallic shine (not really spheres) in unheated chips. They can be also just pieces of rust.
Anyway, for any meaningful heating experiments, only chips with distinct gray layers must be chosen.
What can be the results of such heating of chips corresponding to Laclede ?
1) Microspheres are clearly formed. Then, chips burned by Bentham team were mostly Laclede and our victory is complete and total
)
2) Something like microspheres (similar rounded objects) is formed, but not everywhere and not in all chips. Still, this would be very good result.
3) No spheres are formed. Then, chips shown on Fig. 20 should not be Laclede primer chips.
Chris: What I’m trying to say: for such additional heating experiments, I’m willing to pay some additional bucks (although not very much
).
But currently, I have still the same main message to Jim Millette: Jim, please, try to assign some particular chips, in which epoxy binder was proven by FTIR, to some chips, for which XEDS measured on cross-section basically corresponded to Laclede paint. This would be a key finding for us, “Laclede paint lovers”, who mostly paid for this study
)
. That is exactly the joke we play on new hires where I work. We tell them their first task is to fill out some online "paperwork", but we hide all the desktop icons and leave nothing on the screen but a wallpaper screenshot of the HR website. It drives them nuts that they can't click on links or type in the text fields! 
