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Spherical crystals of alloy phases too hard and brittle for grinding can be obtained by partial remelting and solidification of a powder sample. The alloy powder is blown through an argon-plasma jet melting the surface material of individual fragments, which solidify again as nearly perfect spheres. The yield is a mixture of different materials in which it is possible, however, after heat treatment to find good single crystals of the original composition. Spherical single crystals of Cu9Al4 have been produced by this method and used for a high-precision X-ray investigation described elsewhere.