Almost vintage microscope. How Daft!

The better half brought home her favorite microscope today, one she has been using for 25 years. The service department where going to skip it because a) it didn't light up and b) its not made anymore. It cost £4500 when new and second hand ones go for £1500. Soon fixed, a blown fuse and a new bulb (which came home too) so the real fault was the fuse. It is double pole fused, I suppose that is because you can turn German plugs round.

I left it on soak for a couple of hours, nothing got hot apart from the bulb, so I guess the fuse died of old age. One happy missus. What a potential waste of a wonderfully engineered Zeiss microscope. Attached a picture, it's one of those upside down jobs.

[Welsh Anorak]

Hi
I look after a couple of Leica microscopes for a local geological research company. Well, the lighting side of them at least which is just as over-engineered as the 'scopes themselves using numerous transistors in the control circuit to adjust the brightness. I assume it's to prevent any semblance of flicker at any brightness setting. It's usually fuses, switches, holders and bulbs that are the problem as you'd expect. It's a pleasure to work on this type of thing after another tinplate Turkish TV!
Glyn

[TonyDuell]

I was given a (normal way up) Zeiss microscope because 'it was not worth repairing'. One new component (I forget what, but it was something simple and cheap) in the lamp PSU (which wasn't original anyway, but who cares?) and it's fine. Mine is twin eyepiece, but not stereoscopic. I am sure that the optics are rather better than on any microscope I could otherwise afford.

[paulsherwin]

Old lab equipment like this this does get skipped on a regular basis during refits and rebuilds. I often see it around the University science area though I'm not normally able to rescue anything.

I'm surprised there isn't a strong secondhand market but the contractors doing the refit don't have any incentive to do anything other than dump everything in a recycling skip.

The Oxford Playhouse had a major refit recently and had several big skips in the car park containing 19" racks, PA amps etc, all less than 20 years old and perfectly serviceable.

[G6Tanuki]

It may well have been depurposed because - on examination - it no longer complied with the occupational-health/health&safety requirements for user-adjustability etc.

"It's not made anymore" implies that if - as in this case - it fails, you can't get it fixed in a sensible timescale [remember, downtime is measured in dollars: what's your better-half not-earning while his/her microscope's not-working??]

Personally, I don't see an issue here: what professional microscopist would turn down an offer to replace their 25-year-old legacy 'scope with a brand-new one?

Indeed, I rather posit "What kind of professional employer treats their staff so horridlybadly that they fail to invest in them and expect them to continue using decades-old equipment which fails and so stops them from working?"

Running "Vintage" gear is fine as a hobby, but I sure-as-hell wouldn't expect to have to use it as my daily-earner.

[Radio Wrangler]

An upside-down scope could make SMT work a bit of a challenge....

I got a scrapped Leitz scope with all sorts of accessories. The illuminator is fibre optic to a ring around the objective. The illuminator box has a small halogen spot shining onto the fibre end. It's a few hundred watts and runs so hot it frequently destroyed its socket. I think a hefty LED should do the job.

At a radio rally, a Zeiss stereo scope turned up rather affordably and I bought it. Old scopes are certainly addictive. But out of preference, the one I use is an old Soviet MBC20 I bought from T&OE. It knocks the spots off the Leitz and Zeiss jobs for what I do, but that's a matter of configuration. Certainly the quality of the Russian optics is fully satisfactory.

David

[Outrun_uk]

I'm happy with my ex-education stereo microscope, think it's Griffin branded, for SMD rework. Nice heavy base and good reach, illumination is a single bulb but I use a couple of the Ikea clip on LED lamps, much better and adjustable via the goosenecks.

Also have a Motic one at work, again hacked with Ikea lighting.

[Lucien Nunes]

It can be tricky getting the balance right, especially for more complex systems. Repeated premature replacement can prevent you getting the best of the bathtub curve; once you've solved all the teething problems, the kit gets junked and a whole new set of problems arrives with its replacement. Leaving it too long can result in frequent minor failures or perhaps a seemingly reliable but dangerously brittle system - one irreplaceable part breaks and the whole factory stops.

With small inventories of a particular piece of kit or very high MTBF, the number of expected faults can have such low statistical significance that a preventative maintenance strategy can only really be based on hunches. When you find yourself searching online technical auctions for spare components to keep critical systems running at a multinational PLC with turnover in the billions, you get a nagging feeling it's time to update. But disappointment sets in when you discover, two years after the 'upgrade', that the new kit is failing twice as often as the old ever did.

Sometimes you are let off the hook when external factors, e.g. changes in process specification, interoperability with other systems, regulatory requirements etc, force the issue and bring to an end the roulette game you have been playing with ancient but reliable hardware.

Personally, I don't see an issue here: what professional microscopist would turn down an offer to replace their 25-year-old legacy 'scope with a brand-new one?

I do, a perfectly good microscope (used every day) about to be junked for the sake of a fuse. And goodness knows how long it would take to get a new one, it wasn't scrapped on a replace new for old policy, that would have been OK (as long as the old one got passed on rather than skipped).

Anyway, my wife is very pleased, I am glad to have fixed it and to top it all I have been told to paint it bright purple so no one nicks it. I hope Halfords do bright purple paint.

Thank you Lucien, well summed up, this thing is so low on the bathtub the only thing that can (and did) go wrong is the lighting. It is so well made that only anything bigger than a small hand grenade would cause damage.

[Welsh Anorak]

The firm I do the work for services their microscopes frequently and I don't really see what can go wrong with well-maintained optics, and I wasn't aware there were significant advances in optics over the last few years that justify replacement of the instrument. Most users seem to prefer incandescent to LED illumination, though there are the heat drawbacks mentioned.
Mind you, we wouldn't have ex-lab equipment if this didn't happen! I've got an ebay 'scope by Bausch and Lomb (with custom lighting) for my SMD rework and wouldn't be without it. It's not the renewing of equipment that rankles; it's the skipping of the old and serviceable stuff. I know many struggling theatres that would have been delighted with the cast-offs Paul mentions. (post #4) and we've all seen (and hopefully salvaged in some cases) things in skips that had no right to be there.
Glyn

[MotorBikeLes]

Lovely looking microscope, though I have not seen an "upside down" one before. About 35 years ago I bought a little stereo job, a "ten forty" if I recall. Back when I was doing my service exchange of Grundig TV modules, it paid for itself within days. I quickly found the common thro' link dry joints on a wide range of Tuner/IF modules, saving hours of time and making money. A few years ago, a Watson Stereo job came my way, a proper traditional old unit, but to be frank, the ten forty meets my occasional current needs better. I would love to get my hands on a decent petrological microscope, but not sure I would find time to use it. I did a one year course on microscopy during my tech time, but that was over 50 years ago; I am sure I could prepare a thin section just as quickly as I could back then. We had a decent petrological Watson at work, but I was able to replace it with a rather better Swift, they would not let me go for a Lietz or similar.
Les