Carl Zeiss Jena, Jenaval
Posted: Sun Mar 10, 2024 7:57 am
Hello. I have a Jenaval in need of some restoring and maybe some components as well. This is a 'rescue' scope that has been in a departmental storage for who knows how long, at least a decade if not two. Fortunately in room temperature and dry air. Surprisingly, most mechanical parts seem to move, albeit some with a stiffness. Even the halogen light lit up! 
Coarse focus seemed initially stuck but wasn't - some careful nudging made it move again. The (very complicated looking) condenser probably will require quite a bit of work as the only thing moving seems to be the vertical movement. None of the levers etc. budge.
It has the GF 10x eyepieces and five GF Planachromats on the sextuple revolver. GF stands for 'grossfeld', meaning that these are super wide field, probably close to Orthoplan/Polyvar fields.
Would anyone happen to have an English language version of the user manual, or even better, the repair manual. All I have been able to find for these, are in German and scanned to PDF. Being scanned to PDF, I guess means that a pdf machine translation is maybe unlikely to work. Those machine translation thingies are meant for 'genuine', written PDF documents, I assume.
Also brochures in English on the Jenaval and it's family of scopes would be great! The Jenaval and it's sister scopes were the 80ies research grade option from Carl Zeiss Jena. Based on the individual that I have, they are not quite as polished, and are with greater tolerances (where modular components attach for example) if compared with western or Japanese contemporaries. But the CF250 optics are supposed to be very good.
Coarse focus seemed initially stuck but wasn't - some careful nudging made it move again. The (very complicated looking) condenser probably will require quite a bit of work as the only thing moving seems to be the vertical movement. None of the levers etc. budge.It has the GF 10x eyepieces and five GF Planachromats on the sextuple revolver. GF stands for 'grossfeld', meaning that these are super wide field, probably close to Orthoplan/Polyvar fields.
Would anyone happen to have an English language version of the user manual, or even better, the repair manual. All I have been able to find for these, are in German and scanned to PDF. Being scanned to PDF, I guess means that a pdf machine translation is maybe unlikely to work. Those machine translation thingies are meant for 'genuine', written PDF documents, I assume.
Also brochures in English on the Jenaval and it's family of scopes would be great! The Jenaval and it's sister scopes were the 80ies research grade option from Carl Zeiss Jena. Based on the individual that I have, they are not quite as polished, and are with greater tolerances (where modular components attach for example) if compared with western or Japanese contemporaries. But the CF250 optics are supposed to be very good.