Hi Pete
Thank you for post , allot of info 
, and can tell you sure have a thing for microscopes 
my addiction to machines is coming to an end ,,,,i am dooooomed ,,,,,,,running out of room 
Wonder how much a copy of Hooke's Micrographia would go for .
So what sort of things do you look at through your microscopes ? can you take photographs of what you see ?
Thanks Rob
Hi there, Rob,
First of all about Hooke's Micrographia. Antiquarian books are a financial black hole that, so far, I've managed to avoid! Despite that, over the years I have built up a reasonable library of books on microscopy. Hooke's illustrations are amazing, considering that they were all drawn by hand.
On the subject of Hooke, someone I regard as a 'microscopy cyber-mentor' has recently been experimenting with a replica of Hooke's microscope, including illumination by oil lamp (not quite historically accurate because whale oil isn't in ready supply nowadays!
) Some of his photos, very impressive, are in the photos section of the Yahoo microscopy group.
What do we look at? Well, most of the observation in our family is currently done by my wife. When we took up microscopy, we decided that we didn't want to kill and cut up stuff. Her interest is in pond life and that mostly survives her observations and gets back into the pond. At the moment, my microscopy time seems to be taken up with 'make do and mend'. A couple of years ago I bought a Leitz microscope with built-in illumination from an eBay seller in the USA; of course, it was wired for 115 volts so we used it with an autotransformer. More recently, an orphan base for the same model wired for 240 volts turned up so I bought it and did a base transplant. Another Leitz microscope I bought arrived in pieces - the helical pinion that operated one axis of the mechanical stage was bent over at a crazy angle and several of the screws that held the linear ball-race guides on the stage had sheared-off. I assume that it had been accidentally knocked off the laboratory bench! Spares for that model are only available at professional prices and there was no way I could manufacture a new pinion with its all-in-one shaft. However, you never know what's going to turn up and an identical pinion (but with a shorter shaft) turned up on eBay from a seller in Canada. I successfully lengthened the spindle, replaced the sheared screws and the missing 2 mm balls and, voila, a usable microscope.
A lot of microscopes in amateur use have fairly unusual tungsten filament bulbs. These are expensive even if replacement bulbs are available and this situation looks likely to get worse with the EU policy to outlaw tungsten filaments. There's a lot of interest in converting to white LED illumination and I have some ideas on that subject that I hope to put into practice soon.
We suffer from a problem in our household that any horizontal surface soon gets covered with 'stuff'!
It's particularly so in the workshop and trying to deal with that and fight-back some bench space isn't allowing much time for microscopy just now.
When I do get back to it, my particular interest is in sand. We live on the East Hampshire greensand - the thing about that is that it's never green, usually silver or a 'dirty yeller colour'! I'm told it does look green if you see it in large lumps, say, in a cottage wall. (Once it weathers down to powdered sand the glauconite that gives it the green colour gets washed away.) I got into the habit of picking up samples of sand while I was walking the dog on various local tracts of heathland, I used to describe myself as a 'rabbit-hole geologist! Then I enlisted various globe-trotting friends and acquaintances to bring me back samples from their travels. The collection currently includes samples from as far afield as Sydney Harbour, Baja California, Saudi Arabia and various places in Africa. To examine those properly requires that I do some renovation to a petrological microscope, another item on the to-do list. I think that I did get a bad name with the local Utility Companies - as soon as they dug a deep enough hole in the ground to mend a cable or install a pipe, I'd turn up with a couple of 35 mm film canisters (just the right size) and try to scrounge a sample!
You ask about photos: we do have an eyepiece USB camera but the laptop computer dedicated to that has just died! It doesn't 'do' many megapixels but the optics of microscopy mean that we don't need lots of megapixels for the stuff we look at.
Maybe I'd get more microscopy done and more results in the workshop if I didn't spend so much time in front of this computer looking at forums and bulletin boards!!
so I'd better sign off now.
Best regards,
Pete W.
