Major Modification of Amscope M150

[Greg Howald]

I bought an Amscope M150 microscope because of its portability. Little did I know I was sacrificing portability for suitability.
It has a one watt LED illuminator. Just not enough light at 40x and very bad at 60 or 100x.
This prompted me to make some serious adaptations.
I went to the microscope graveyard where I found a microscope base with a 20 watt halogen illumination system. I removed everything from the base of the M150 and settled it onto the 20 watt illuminator and found a good amount of light, encouraging me to proceed.
I made a cradle to set the small microscope into so that any time I set the scope onto the illuminator it would automatically be on center and be very stable.
I removed the diffuser from the base illuminator. Result was not bad but I wanted more light and removed the diffuser from the scope. Plenty of light then. I turned off the room light and saw that light from the illuminator was spread out enough to be reflected from the ceiling.
So I went back to the microscope graveyard where I found a condenser. NA 125. I placed it where the diffuser had been and got very little light so I removed the top lens from the condenser and tried again. Boom! Blinding.
I made a tube that I could slide up and down with an iris diaphragm on top of it and put it over the condenser to control contrast, put a dark field filter on top of that. Raised the tube slowly and had darkfield and Rheinberg illumination. I feel as though I made a microscope from a toy.

[apochronaut]

Makes me a little nervous putting a 20 watt halogen into a 1 watt led pocket. 20 watt halogens give off a lot of heat . You are happy with the heat dissipation?

[Greg Howald]

Yes. I'm happy with the heat at this point. I reduced the wattage from 30 to 20 and there's no plastic near it now. I am thinking about a small fan like they put in computers to move air if needed, but I haven't used the scope much yet and it won't be my go-to scope. I think I'll be ok with it.
Greg

[DonSchaeffer]

Congratulations. That was my first microscope. I did remove that wheel and added a condenser. I tried to figure out how to make dark field, nothing as skillfully done as you.

[Greg Howald]

Hi Don.
I used a paper towel roller because it is already cylindrical and paper is easy to work with. I made one cylinder to fit snuggly over the base of the illuminator and another cylinder to fit over top of the first cylinder so I had a slider that I could move up and down and had enough friction to stay where I put it. I made a filter holder on the top of the outside tube to hold a filter that is 1 1/4inch in diameter. Center stop is 1/2 inch diameter. I glued the inside tube to the base of the illuminator. Then I simply slid the outer tube upward until I reached the sweet spot. Overall height above the illuminator base was about 45mm.
Greg

[DonSchaeffer]

A man after my own heart.