Wild Makrozoom Standalone (and the adaptation thereof)

[Scarodactyl]

I know that asking after you buy is a bit like consulting a lawyer after you sign a contract, but I spotted this on eBay with a few hours left and decided to make a lowball offer on it. Surprisingly they accepted, and it'll be on its way here soon:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Wild-Heerbrugg ... 2910685966
Image from seller (click for full size)

It's obviously a Wild Heerbrugg makrozoom objective like you'd find in an M420, but it appears to be naked, upsidedown and mounted on its own stand. I'm definitely out of my (very shallow) depth on this one. Has anyone seen this before?
My biggest hope would be that I could somehow hook a camera up to it as-is, though I imagine that at best it's missing some necessary components. For photographing gem inclusions something like the m420 is very appealing, since it avoids some of the problems with a stereoscope while allowing the necessary working distance to see inside stones.
Thanks for taking a look everyone! This forum is absolutely amazing.

[MichaelG.]

I've just followed your link, and up popped this as a "more chances" suggestion:
https://www.ebay.com/p/Wild-Heerbrugg-M ... 1110963332

I suspect that you may have grabbed a bargain.

MichaelG.

[Scarodactyl]

Thanks! Yeah, I sure hope so. It came in today, and the news is mixed.
It appears to indeed be a stanalone makrozoom with the photo tube, basically a Wild M420 without the oculars, a setup similar to a lot of industrial zoom lenses mentioned here. It is on what appears to be a motorized focus mount, of course without the controller. I am guessing that the legs must have been bolted to the bottom of a stage, and a cctv camera was directly connected to it for wafer inspection or something like that. I've never seen one configured quite like this, though I did find someone selling a couple with CCTV cameras directly attached.






The good: the zoom mechanism turns smoothly, and I can resolve a (tiny) image through it by holding it over a surface freehand.

The bad: there is definitely something on one of the internal lenses. I am hoping it is not mold. It doesn't appear hazy anyway, so there is that.

Basically I am hoping I can clean it (or more likely have it cleaned) and that there isn't permanent damage to the optics. From there, hopefully adapting it to a camera with a bigger sensor than a standard cctv and either figuring out the motorized mount or replacing it with a manual one. One way or another if the optics are good it should be a fun project, hopefully with some good pictures at the end of it.

[MichaelG.]

I hope the clean-up goes well

Regarding cameras: I think my approach would be to fit a Micro 4/3 or similar sensor and see what the image circle looks like.
If the original optics are configured for a full C-mount camera, it might work nicely with a sensor that size ... which would save searching for additional relay lenses of 'Wild-quality'.

Other suggests will, I'm sure, be forthcoming.

MichaelG.

[Scarodactyl]

I figured the best first step would be to see what kind of image it can produce, so I ordered a c-mount to m42 adapter and an adjustable m42 extender, which just came in today. Since I already had an m42-canon adapter for my other microscope adapter I figured I would give that a try:

Hooking it up was easy, getting a picture freehand a little bit less so. A) it's pretty heavy and B) the attachment at the end is bulky and leaves very little working distance. I was eventually able to get a shot mostly in focus of a piece of paper sidelit by an LED pen light:

(click for fullsize)
Given the way I had to take the photo and the apparent mold on the optics I think it turned out surprisingly well! It even gets full sensor coverage on the canon rebel t3. I still need to figure out how to remove some of the extra attachments, particularly the thing on the end, figure out some sort of focus mount, and from there assess where the dirt/mold is and what kind of cleaning will need to be done. But so far so good I think?

[75RR]

Promising start.
Definitely go for a mount for it first.
Only way to see what it can really do. Keep us posted

[Scarodactyl]

It's been a while, but I've made a little progress on this recently (after being distracted by some other projects (including the nearly-functional complete m420 that I purchased shortly after this). From having had to remove the makrozoom objective on the M420 to access the focus rack I realized that I could also easily remove the objective from this setup without having to disassemble anything else, hoping to find the optical issue and see how hard it's going to be to deal with. So I unscrewed the single hex screw to have a look:


I found the problem! It's pretty bad, looking like a combination of mold(?) and delamination, BUT it's entirely restricted to the 'head'/photo tube. The objective appears to be perfectly clean.

With some more unscrewing I finally managed to get the rest of the c-mount assembly apart.

Aside from the single lens at the bottom it is just an empty tube. No way to get at it from the c-mount end, but there are those classic notches for unscrewing it (whatever those are called).

I, of course, as an optical expert have the exact tool to remove this part.
By which I mean I ground 1/8" off the edge of a wood chisel.


I am not 100% sure what this does. Maybe it mimics the 1.25x magnification of an m400 series head? I can resolve an image through the tube with or without it. Most of the surface material is dust which wiped off easily but of course the rest is permanent damage from mold.

I doubt I'll find another one of those lenses, so I have been thinking about whether I might be able to fit another head onto it. I could mount it on bellows directly to a camera of course, but if I can get a full head on it that would be neat. I found an old link to an eBay auction for a kludge where someone put an apozoom objective onto a Leica DM series compound microscope head https://www.ebay.com/itm/LEICA-M420-M40 ... ltDomain_0 . That said, IIRC leica heads have correcting optics in the head itself which likely wouldn't be great for a wild zoom objective.

Just to see how it would go, since I have an AO one ten teaching model with two heads I figured I'd give this monstrosity a try:

And stuck on my nikon smz base just to make the kludge that much kludgier:

And... it works! At least sort of!

I can readily resolve images, though I noticed some odd distortion when looking at things on inclined planes. The real annoyance here is that (as I should have guessed) the image is reversed as in a compound microscope.
I know lots of people work with that every day, get used to it and do amazing work under those conditions. But thanks to my regular use of a stereoscope I have become accustomed to a certain standard of living. I have a feeling there's not going to be an easy way around that if I use a normal compound microscope head? It seems that the Leica solution for their z6/z16 series really is to just hook it up to a stereo head, if this is any indication: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Leica-Mikrosko ... 3640354084 I have a feeling that this might significantly degrade the image, since the head is collecting from either side of the lens rather than the center