Laboratory Microscope Upgrade

We have an old Olympus IX-70 fluorescent microscope in our lab at Mizzou that has been here for at least a decade.  Although it's a very nice scope, it's been pretty badly neglected over the past few years and has fallen a bit into disrepair.  For my fluorescent microscopy needs, I've been using another professor's brand new microscope with good results.  But recently, an undergraduate researcher in our lab expressed a need to take data using a fluorescent microscope.  Unfortunately, the fluorescent microscope that I've been using is housed in a user facility, and the student would need training and special permission - not to mention pay an exorbitant fee - to access the facility.  So I decided this might be a good opportunity to upgrade our IX-70 and get it back into good working order.

The first step was to order a new dust cover and eyepieces.  At around the same time these items arrived, we had a certified technician come over from St. Louis to adjust and align the optics so that everything would be nicely dialed in.  This particular microscope has a trinocular design, which means that it has three different light paths for viewing a specimen.  With the first setting, the eyepieces are used to view the specimen.  With the second, the image is sent into the side port, which is equipped with a digital camera.  When the third setting is used, the light path is split, with 20% of the signal going to the eyepieces and the other 80% going to the front port.  As you can see in the picture below, the front port is connected to a 35mm camera.  Since we have no need for a 35mm camera, particularly with a digital camera on the side port, I thought it would be nice to equip the front port with a more useful piece of hardware.  And for our applications, it doesn't get much more useful than a spectrometer.

We had an extra Ocean Optics USB4000 handheld spectrometer that no one was using, but I needed a way to interface it with the microscope.  So first, I ordered an adapter from ThorLabs with 1" female threading that would attach to the microscope's front port.  When we received the adapter, I was disappointed to find that it was slightly too small for the front port, so that when the set screws were tightened the adapter was pushed to one side and no longer centered.  The shop guys in our department machined a beautiful collar for the adapter, which allows the adapter to slide snugly into place, but includes holes that allow the set screws to be tightened effectively.  Next, I threaded an SMA adapter into the 1" threading in the center of the adapter; this adapter is what the optical fiber will screw on to.  I also built and attached a lens tube to the backside of the adapter.  The lens tube slides into the microscope housing and directs the light from the specimen right onto the center of the SMA adapter and into the optical fiber.  With the adapter in place, the front port now looks more like this:

And here it is with the spectrometer connected to it:

Earlier this week, we put in another order for a brightfield filter that will give a more natural white light to our brightfield images.  Also included in the order was a new mercury bulb for the fluorescence lamp.  When these items have been installed, our old IX-70 will literally be better than brand new.  And there's been talk of ordering a new camera for the scope sometime this summer, which would also be a big upgrade.