MicrobeHunter.com Microscopy Forum

Assembled the eyepiece camera to the reduction lens with the adapter. Slid these into the drawtube of the antique Spencer microscope, using an antique Spencer 370 illuminator lamped with a 25 watt tubular frosted lightbulb from the local hardware store. Spencer_mono1.JPG Took an image from a prepare...

Then switched to the boring bar, bored the inside to three different diameters, then turned the boring bar around to the other end and used the internal thread cutter to cut the mating threads for C-mount connector on the reduction lens. I'm lucky the C-mount specification is old and American, and b...

Went out into the garage where all the tools and equipment are, and scrounged up a piece of aluminum round stock. Cut off a section with the Harbor Freight Tools cutoff saw. Shakes and rattles while it's running, but got the job done a lot quicker than using a hack saw. Cutoff_saw.JPG Chucked up the...

Thanks! I will read about the carmine dyes and Crystal Violet. Almost sure I have CV somewhere. In addition, I might still try and make the most of classical organelle-specific dyes like toluidine blue, safranine etc, that so beautifully and selectively stain plant parts, with PVA as mountant. Have...

"Solid" PVA glue contains water, so these stains will be washed away in PVA too... do you think that the resin should not contain water at all ? for example, even the popular glycerine jelly contains water. Arthur Bolles Lee wrote that Carmine stains would keep in glycerine or glycerine jelly mount...

I re-inspected some onion upper epidermis slides that I had made 9 months ago. They had been fixed with IPA-lactic acid, 3:1, stained with Safranin, Or Methylene Blue, or Toluidine Blue, mounted in 80% fructose in water and immediately sealed with nail polish. Initially they looked well. Today, the...

Is there a LED light in the microscope or perhaps in the room? No, there's neither a LED light in the room nor in the lamp house of the microscope. I think it has something to do with the camera, because I don't see it when observing by eye. In order to use this little gadget effectively, I will ne...

I was wondering if the rows of tiny holes (punctae?), so close together, might be acting like a diffraction grating, separating the colors like the reflections of light sources off a CD-ROM disk, which can be used as a poor man's diffraction grating? But the colors disappear under high magnification...

An admirable contribution it will be, Radazz. Thanks in advance. I hope that, as part of it, you can recommend some trusty sealing materials for permanent mounts. I have been using nail polish and gel nail polish, but would love to know about other, perhaps better, sealants. Rick here, Are you look...

Over the next few weeks, I'll post information of where to find chemicals and glassware to make permanent slides. If you know of a good source, please contribute! This is a big topic, and will be broken down into individual sections on chemicals for fixatives, dehydrating chemicals, stains, clearing...

Looks like you found a rare, exotic nematode!

I'm getting real bad horizontal banding issues in my images taken with the eyepiece camera, if there is much clear background in the image.

In order to use this little gadget effectively, I will need to use smooth direct current to power the illumination lamp in the microscope.

The fact that someone took a Dremel to it in many places means the final bids might not go to astronomic heights. The wealthy bidders who want a shiny example of a very rare scientific instrument for their collections might not be interested in this one. At any rate, the real bids will be placed wit...

I spotted that last night, but I guess I posted the heads-up in the wrong subforum... Here's the business description of the seller: http://www.ebaystores.com/OCDepot The scope may have been stolen, but I think there's also a possibility that it was turned over to OC Depot by an educational institut...

Would the microscope slide over the business end of an A/O Ortho illuminator? There's one up at Ebay now, item 163474212736.

Was browsing Ebay and this turned up. Might be of interest to collectors of vintage research microscopes. I believe this was B&L's top of the line research microscope when it was made, I think in the 1930s. Looks like it was designed to have the light source shine in from behind the microscope, almo...

Cool looking old Black Beauty Spencer model. I notice it has the achromatic condenser with centering mounts in the condenser body. That means it was outfitted with apo objectives originally, and one remains. This would be a good scope for somebody. Can't see under the condenser, does it have a mirro...

There are some screws holding the illuminator unit to the frame, from the underside. If you loosen those a bit, you can wiggle the whole illuminator unit around a little. That might help get the diaphragm a little closer to center.

I think the refractive index of wintergreen oil is a bit too high to make a good immersion fluid. Also, it's a very good solvent.

Tung oil is a fairly good match, but it dries by polymerizing in contact with air. If it's allowed to dry on an objective, it is impervious to most solvents.

Very cool looking project! Those 3D printers can be handy... If you can locally find castor oil or glycerin, those have a higher index of refraction than water, and closer to immersion oil. Some folks use these products instead of immersion oil for routine purposes, and they work fine. Both have a h...

I used the vernier mic mainly to see how much variation there was. I think a .001" caliper would be fine for all but the most exacting requirements. If the covers are between .006" and .007", they should be good for most mounts. If any extra thick covers show up during checking, I think they would b...

I like those images, especially the last two from the first image set. I have an old Perfect brand prepared slide of pond plankton made in the '60s, and one of the objects looks a lot like those last two images. Are radiolaria found in fresh water? Hi Doron, nice images! Since radiolaria have no col...

I've been looking for something to get cheap-but-acceptable quality. Higher MP cameras are coming down in price. EG ebay item 323006982235 is £37 = approx $50 for a 5MP. May be a better start :?: That should be a good camera. The eyepiece adapter contains no optics. As is, the camera would only cov...

Thanks, Bob! Over the years I have done research on internet based specialty supply companies, that sell to the public, that have many of the chemicals used in the older recipes for permanent slide making. I don't know how available these products would be outside the US. Some chemicals can also be ...

The 0.3X reduction lens arrived yesterday. Below is the Ebay listing I used to buy it: https://www.ebay.com/itm/0-3X-C-mount-Microscope-Adapter-for-CCD-Cmos-Camera-Digital-Eyepiece-Relay-Lens/273459117292?ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT&var=572846360718&_trksid=p2060353.m2749.l2649 I ordered it on Dec...

After these early slide making attempts in my late teens, many years went by without using the microscope. A little over ten years later, in the mid 1980s, I started looking at samples of pond water from a local park. Attempts were made to make some permanent slides of spirogyra, stained in hematoxy...

I wonder what kind of field of view is given by the old A/O cat. 146 eyepieces I use? The tube diameter is the old style 23.2 mm, so I guess the field would not be as wide as the modern eyepieces. Still, they seem wide enough for me. It's probably just as well that I've never seen the extra wide fie...

If you have some time on your hands, you can put some medium grit sandpaper on a flat surface and rub the blades across it, switching sides frequently. Then switch to fine grit paper to get a better finish. This takes a while, but to me is a bit more controllable than a bench grinder, which works pr...

I mentioned this a while back, and it can be downloaded for free: There are some very good, detailed drawings of all kinds of freshwater micro-flora and micro-fauna in Freshwater Biology by Ward and Whipple, published in 1918, downloadable on the internet. The only major drawback is that the genus a...

Happy New Year! From "flyover country" in the USA