MicrobeHunter.com Microscopy Forum

Oh yes, do avoid the nasty stuff like cooking paraformaldehyde in an apartment! I would probably be ok with using FAA or FPA myself, but not heating it. But I can certainly understand avoiding it with kids around, too. Of the alcohols, I think a methanol would be your best bet. Of course it is extre...

I think there has simply been vastly more histological work and research on animal tissue than there has been on plant tissues. Why? The money has been in animal tissue research, not plants. Probably as simple as that. For coagulating botanical fixatives there is really nothing very good that I know...

Wow, those are garbage! How frustrating and what a waste. The past several months I have had a record number of similar "bait and switch" purchases, attempts to sell me items that have clearly already been returned as defective, etc. I guess it's probably ramifications of the pandemic shutdowns. I'm...

Yes, a square wire ring or maybe a chain link of just the right size would probably work. On the other hand, you don't really want them to move around and dislodge anyway, so the board assembly facilitates that.

Leonard

A good thought, but unfortunately the ring idea doesn't work - tried every size I could find, but the shape of the forceps is such that you can't get a consistent variation on the pressure by sliding it up or down.

Leonard

I frequently make wholemounts of leaves and vibratome thick sections. It's often helpful to clamp the coverglass in place while the mounting media sets up. Over the past several years I have really struggled to find a good way to do that. I've tried weights of various sorts, clothes pins, bent wires...

I use the same slide dispenser. It's pretty good, though I need to glue the knobs on because they keep falling off at inconvenient moments. Definitely speeds up the process of floating sections on silanized slides. If you are using a section adhesive like Haupts or something, I suppose it would prob...

It looks very much like the analyzer head of an old polarimeter... But I don't see anything like it made by Leitz noted on the web. Does the eyepiece on the outer edge magnify a scale?

This is a hard problem to solve. You might try Visikol ("for Plant Biology"), or your normal sodium/postassium hydroxide clearing routine followed by a version of Heir's BB-4 1/2 solution. (Viz - 1 part benzyl benzoate plus 9 parts of a solution consisting of 2:2:2:2:1 lactic acid, phenol, clove oil...

Thanks!!

Leonard

Zetopan pol, yes. The stage is a work of art. Very uncommon, very expensive. The monocular tube with Bertrand lens is also hard to find (just found one after years of looking...) The analyzer slider is also hard to source at a reasonable price point. A Zetopan in good condition isn't necessarily the...

Does anyone happen to know whether the dovetail slide for the Ortholux II turret and the Diavert turret are the same dimensions? Or, if somebody has a Diavert can I please have the dimensions of the turret dovetail slide? I can't seem to find an answer on the web... I have, by the way, a Ploemopak 2...

Thanks. Great resource, but I don't find it there. I have emailed Wolfgang. Hopefully he knows. The eccentric rings idea struck me as a possibility, too, but I cannot quite see how it would work with the mechanism as I understand it.

Leonard

Hello, all you Soviet microscope cognoscenti - The postman recently delivered a beautiful 1950 vintage Lomo Min-4 polarizing petrographic microscope to my office. Such a kind man. Anyway, I have everything working well, but am having a very hard time centering the rotating stage, and am hoping someo...