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I attach some more photos.
I had a many goes at moving the prism by hand -
from outside the inspection plate but that was impossible - the plate is too small.
After my second go at gluing the prism in position -
I then focused in on some dust on a microscope slide and took some pictures
with my mobile phone into the left and right eyepieces.
You can take the side on Y piece of dust as reference and you can see
that the right hand side shows that piece moved to the right and also upwards.
Also nearly half the frame is blacked out - caused by the broken prism properties.
I did find that if I move the prism further away from the eyepiece
the darkened area gets smaller because the damaged area is less inside the optical path.
It's possible that it could be glued on to a slightly better place.
However there is no way I could align the binoviewer even if I had a spare good prism.
The inspection plate hole is too small to a get fingers in to adjust it.
I thought of drastic solutions:
(1) drill 2 holes in the right hand side of the binoviewer and attach 2 straws via silicone
to the prism so I could move it from outside the case to an ideal position.
(2) use a hacksaw and cut the whole right hand top off the housing -
glue it back later if successful.
(3) make a custom L bracket out of thin Aluminium which would go in from the top
of the inspection housing and attach via silicone to the bottom of the prism
so it could be moved and aligned while looking through both eyepieces.
Remove the L- bracket if successful.
None of those are worth my time considering the prism is history but
even if a new prism turned up it still looks dubious as to whether it could ever be aligned?
I don't know how they did it in the Leitz factory?
Maybe it was pre-aligned on a jig outside the binoviewer?
Is this how they normally make binoviewers?
It would have been much nicer if the prism was held in a cage with adjusting screws.
The glue they used is very hard - it looks like epoxy resin.
It seems like an awful solution that after making a precision microscope
that it's only working because of some glue on the prisms.
I suppose binoculars and many other devices only have glued prisms too?
Anyway I've learnt a lot as this was my first time opening up a binoviewer.
Any comments?
cheers
Allan
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