We developed a foot-long aluminum “microscope” cantilever to use in our undergraduate laboratory. The detection mechanism is by means of a vibrating piezoelectric. The tip-sample interaction is obtained by means of springs attached at the end of the cantilever. The main objective is to provide students with a large cantilever from where they can build an intuitive feel of the instrument. Also, and perhaps more important, we teach the student how to extract forces from kinematics data. We let the cantilever move under the action of the interaction force, and record that motion as a voltage produced by the vibrating piezoelectric. That voltage is then processed to reproduce the F-d (Force-distance) curve. As opposed to what happens in the real microscope, in our case we have access to the sources of force and thus we can check the accuracy of our reconstruction algorithm by comparing our reconstructed Fd curve with the known one.