A Bausch and Lomb Microscope Project

A while back I bought an 80-gallon drum full of microscopes - I decided to modify one for my own use,
which I will attempt to explain in way too much detail - it's a mixture of electrical, metal working, a
journey of discovery, and the nonsense of a slippery slope. I didn't take a picture of the barrel, but we
can start with a bunch of the microscopes after they were cleaned up:
You may notice something special about these - the illumination port on the side of the microscope. -
This is what attracted me to these and why I tried to clean them up rather than immediately scrap
them for parts. So now onto the next post where we can explore this port and why it is good for a
metallurgical/geological type application where you are looking at something opaque.

First, let's look at the illuminator port carefully - you will see, in the photo a sort of torus type mirror

This special mirror assembly takes the light from the illuminator and sends it down the outside of the
lens, and lets the light returned from the sample pass up through the center of the mirror without
perturbation. It took me a while to realize this, it's not a half-silvered mirror nor a prism. I'm explaining
these things in a different order than I discovered them because it makes more sense.

To make this work, there are special lenses (the black lens shown in the photo above), which have a
matching light path as shown below.
You can see the clear plastic surround that picks up the light from the illuminator and directs it down
to the sample, around the other optical parts of the lens. These lenses are somewhat uncommon but I
find them on eBay from time to time.

So, we want some light to go into the illuminator, and rather than use a halogen or other incandescent
as would have been the original illumination in the 70s when this microscope was built, I decided to
use 3W LEDs - 3W of LED is about equal to 15W of regular incandescent or halogen. I found some
inexpensive LEDs on eBay (shipped from China of course) that would fit in the housing with a little
machining. Here is the LED assembly that I made to fit in the aluminum housing that was machined by
the prior owners of these scopes.
Since these LEDs are cheap, I bought several and decided to add one under the stage so that I could use
it to light a transparent sample (like a traditional slide)
In the future I may make a better bracket for this LED assembly, the bracket is something quick and
easy I made by bending (and then accidentally braking) the clip springs that came with the LED
assembly.

So, now we need the LED power supplies and a 115V input and control - this was a bit tedious - the
base is an aluminum alloy (Zamac?) and pretty thick, and I decided that the right way to do this was to
use a standard computer type electrical connector so the microscope when stored wouldn't need to
have a power cord wound around it. So, I carved the base with a carbide burr and a hacksaw (it would
have taken too long to take the base apart, there are a lot of parts, and then mill it on my mill). In the
end that worked out pretty well.
and I needed to wire it up - and make everything fit. conveniently the actual LED drivers are pretty
tiny, so I was able to open the case for the driver and stuff two drivers into one case. The case is held
to the microscope bottom with a #2 socket head cap screw.

It just barely fits, it took a little metal removal to keep it from being proud of the base. Some groves
cut into the webbing in the feet and some holes for switches, a bit of wiring and Poof, it's done. one
switch for each LED.
some day in the future I may make a bottom plate for this, or maybe not.

So, now, how does it work? well, first, let's use the one lens I have purchased for this microscope, a
20X, and I will be using a 10X eyepiece, giving 200X total magnification.
And we need something to look at - in this case a silk-screened label from a blood test kit that I
scrapped

You can see that the lens is very close to the sample, so close that a ring light or other oblique
illumination would be completely ineffective.
But, with the illumination through the lens, it works - you are looking in this picture at a part of one of
the smaller letters on the label, and you can clearly see the thickness of the paint, the flow out along
the edges, and the surface of the label
very cool, I was excited by this, but there is one trick that it took to make it work. If you just shine the
light through the illuminator, you get a very washed out view, not at all what you see above. But these
scopes have one more cool feature, they have a "dark field" setting. What that does is to put an opaque
disk in the center of the light path, so that light only goes along the outer part of the path, and you
don't get the direct light bouncing back, rather you only see the light that is scattered from the
sample. Pretty cool, no?
Next Up, That Darned Slippery Slope

I had mentioned that these lenses are a bit hard to find. Not only do you need a lens configured for a
215mm tube length (did you know that different lenses are set to different tube lengths? 160mm is
common for B&L, some others use 170mm, and American Optical uses an ∞ configuration that makes
the scopes somewhat immune to tube length. I didn't know this and much about it doing this project),
but you also need the special transparent surround to carry the light past the optics - it works without
that but not nearly as well. So, I really wanted a set of lenses. This is the view looking down into the
lens turret assembly showing the correction lens that comes with the illuminator - nice that they gave
me this hint, isn't it?

In January, I went to a microscope society

meeting, showed off my handiwork with
the LED and asked if anyone had some
lenses. well, you know what happened - I
was offered a complete scope for less than
the cost of a lens, how could I refuse. And
it had a case (not the exact right case for
this scope, but a B&L case.

So of course I bought it - and refinished the

case, and after refinishing it, I had to make
a key for it because there was none - and
that meant figuring out how the lock
worked. Got that done, sand, clean, spray,
modify the inside a little bit, and some filing with a brass prototype key, then make it out of some
scrap sheet steel.
So now, about the microscope - this one was complete

and of course, it had a set of four lenses

and it had the entire illuminator with the place for filters, and two irises. and of course, one of the
irises was stuck (oil turns to glue) and I broke the handle taking it out to get it unstuck - that will be a
project for the future
The illuminator has a condenser lens too
And the illuminator is designed for an incandescent lamp that fits in this socket
but I want LED illumination, the whole LED costs less than a replacement bulb (that is sort of special
because it wants the filament in a precise location), so some simple machining and I have my final LED
assembly ready to fit (and yes, it fits nicely)

This microscope, being designed for opaque work, has a filler for the hole in the stage so your stuff
doesn't fall through
There is a microwave thick film terminator sitting on the stage, we will encounter that in a bit.
So, now, how does it work? well, here is the LED illuminating the same medical device label we were
looking at before

And now, what's it like to look through the lens with a cell phone camera? let's see.

This scope is set up with 15X eyepieces, and the lenses are 8X, 10X, 20X, 40X, so multiply by 15 to get
total magnification. So, let's look at that paint again, first at 8X
and then at 20, which is really 300X when you account for the eyepieces.

And now, for something a bit more interesting, let's revisit that microwave terminator - you can see it
here under the 8X lens - if the focus was a little better, you would see a metalized trace crossing the
long way and a carbon deposited resistor going across it and terminating at the edges. The edges are
metalized and the bottom is metalized except for a part in the center under the resistance element -
this all works out so that at microwave frequencies (probably 6 to18 GHz, but I haven't tested this
thing) you don't get a lot of reflections (VSWR).

So here it is at 20 X (e.g.300 total), you can see the edge of the resistive trace over the metallized
path.
, and here it is at full 40X (600X) magnification

There are a lot of cell phone camera artifacts, but you can really see the fine detail of the element
and the metallization and if so, inclined could look at the porosity, and uniformity.