AO oddity.

[apochronaut]

From time to time these show up on ebay but more often the companion # 1024 100x planachro. I have never seen a similar # 1022 , # 1019, or # 1017; the other three companion objectives in the first AO infinity planachro series.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/American-Optica ... SwJs1ZyUYq

Optically, these are the same as the # 1023 made in Buffalo. It's even possible and likely that AO shipped the lenses to Austria for assembly, since the Buffalo plant would be making practical batch runs of the same optical components and a pile of small lenses could be shipped a lot cheaper, than to set up and make them in another factory. The barrels would be a lot less expensive to turn out locally, and at the time, Austria was still climbing out of a severely depressed economy and assembly was much cheaper there , than in the U.S.

For a while, in the 70's, Reichert Austria made infinity corrected microscopes with 34mm parfocal lenses. The Neovar 2 is an example and probably were not sold in North America. These were based on the AO system, and used objectives which were identical to the AO objectives, except they were branded Reichert and were spring loaded, because Reichert derived their mechanisms from the their 160mm tube instruments, still being made.

I don't know why AO would have objectives with potentially spring loaded barrels made in Austria for their non spring loaded systems but it might just have been an economic decision and an economy of scale may have ruled here, since AO owned Reichert but or a while, these Austrian made objectives were sent to Buffalo, built on the Austrian spring loaded pattern. They are not even spring loaded, they just look that way but the mechanism is disabled internally, with a stop replacing the spring.

The Neovar 2 documentation from 1981, lists the objectives as achromats as well as planachros and the 63x semi-plan which eventually showed up as the cat.# 1303 AO/Reichert objective . Based on the N.A.s and optical formatting it seems all but the 63x were AO objectives, probably assembled in Austria, and re-purposed for the (then) new Reichert infinity corrected medium grade lab scopes.