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:
![Image](https://i.imgur.com/2lxSYUb.png)
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.
![Image](https://i.imgur.com/Uun6NTs.png)
With some more unscrewing I finally managed to get the rest of the c-mount assembly apart.
![Image](https://i.imgur.com/HaE6We6.jpg)
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).
![Image](https://i.imgur.com/NtVaH1u.jpg)
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.
![Image](https://i.imgur.com/1EEwMQU.jpg)
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:
![Image](https://i.imgur.com/4d0D752.jpg)
And stuck on my nikon smz base just to make the kludge that much kludgier:
![Image](https://i.imgur.com/4AWXbSQ.jpg)
And... it works! At least sort of!
![Image](https://i.imgur.com/r3VrDcT.jpg)
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