Planning on using off-the-shelf probes in your AFM? How cheap can you get those nowadays? I remember being worried about crashing them too often with our modest lab budget.
No, I'll be manufacturing them. There are alternative ways of making cantilevers with atomically-sharp tips. Tungsten wire, for instance, can be etched down to less than a few nanometers. And the quartz clocks in almost all electronic devices can be decapped and used as an oscillator.
