Good evening, everyone! I recently got into microscopy after stumbling upon Journey to the Microcosmos on youtube while doomscrolling (seen a lot of that on the forum
![Laughing :lol:](./images/smilies/icon_lol.gif)
Being broke and in college, my budget was, umm... naught. Nevertheless, I'm a DIY kind of person, so I tried to work within those constraints. After a lot of reading and overthinking, I found a listing on a 2nd hand online store and met up with the seller. It was quite worrying to see him produce the microscope from the back of a motorcycle with no real protection besides the dust cover but, to my amazement, everything worked perfectly; 40€ well spent!
The scope in question is a 3B Scientific W30610 with 4x, 10x, and 40x objectives. Not a beast by any means, but the quality is quite remarkable for the price tag (with some exceptions, we'll get to that). It had a few shortcomings in terms of features, but nothing a shopping spree on Aliexpress couldn't fix. In the end, I got a screw-on mechanical stage, an actual Abbe condenser (the original "condenser" was a single lens with no light cone, which prevented me from playing around with filters and darkfield), and a phone adapter.
I've been having a ton of fun with this thing, but I've come up against a few problems. I'm not sure if this is the place to ask this sort of question, but here goes nothing (I'll make another post if there's an issue).
1. The 4x and 10x objectives work very well, but the image on the 40x is awful. It's all washed out, with very little contrast and resolution; darkfield only makes these issues worse. Below are two photos, one taken with the 10x and another with the 40x (sorry about the quality, phone camera = bad). I've tried cleaning the bottom lens to no avail. I have a few hypotheses but i'd really appreciate some feedback, since I'm new to this hobby and I don't wanna take the thing apart without having some idea of what I'm doing:
a. The condenser isn't properly aligned. Since it's a 3rd party component, I had a few issues getting it to work properly. Perhaps the focus of the light cone is off-centred or too low.
b. The aperture of the condenser is too small when compared to the objective (0.65).
c. There is dirt on the inside of the objective.
d. The objective is damaged or just plain bad and will need to be replaced.
2. As you can see in the pictures, the eyepiece came with a pointer needle, which is a bit annoying. Is there an easy way to remove it without damaging the lens?
Thanks in advance, and a good afternoon to you all!