Maintenance and Troubleshooting of the Microscope
1. Maintenance and upkeep
(1) Overall maintenance: The biological microscope should be placed in a dry, cool, dust-free, and non corrosive place. After use, it should be wiped clean immediately and covered with a dust-proof breathable cover or placed in a box.
(2) Maintenance of mechanical systems: After use, wipe clean with a clean cloth and regularly apply some neutral lubricating grease to the sliding parts. If there is serious pollution, it can be washed with gasoline first and then wiped dry. But never use alcohol or ether for cleaning, as these reagents can corrode machinery and paint, causing damage.
(3) Maintenance of optical system: After use, gently wipe the lenses of the eyepiece and objective lens with a clean and soft silk cloth. When there are stains that cannot be wiped off, you can use a long fiber degreasing cotton or a clean fine cotton cloth dipped in a small amount of dimethyl benzene or lens cleaning solution (3 parts alcohol: 1 part ether) to wipe them off. Then dry it with a clean and soft silk cloth or blow dry with a hair dryer. It should be noted that the cleaning solution must not penetrate into the interior of the objective lens, otherwise it will damage the objective lens. The spotlight (only available for XSP-13A and 16A models) and reflector only need to be wiped clean after use.
2. Troubleshooting of common faults
(1) The self sliding of the lens barrel: This is one of the common malfunctions that occur in biological microscopes. The solution to the microscope with a shaft sleeve structure can be divided into two steps.
Step 1: Hold the two coarse adjustment handwheels with both hands and tighten them with relative force. See if the problem can be solved. If it still cannot be solved, use a dedicated double column wrench to unscrew a coarse adjustment handwheel and add a friction plate. After tightening the handwheel, if it is difficult to rotate, the added friction plate is too thick and can be replaced with a thinner one. The standard is that the handwheel rotation is effortless, and the lens barrel can move up and down easily without sliding down on its own. Friction plates can be punched with a punch using waste photographic film and soft plastic films less than 1 millimeter thick.
Step 2: Check the meshing status between the gear on the coarse adjustment handwheel shaft and the rack on the barrel body. The up and down movement of the lens barrel is accomplished by the gear driven rack. In theory, the optimal meshing state between gears and racks is when the dividing line of the rack is tangent to the dividing circle of the gear. In this state, the gear rotates easily and causes some wear on the rack. There is now a wrong approach, which is to add a shim behind the rack to tightly press the gear and prevent the barrel from sliding down. At this point, the dividing line of the rack intersects with the dividing circle of the gear, and the tips of the gear and rack are tightly pressed against each other's tooth roots. When gears rotate, severe grinding occurs between them. Due to the fact that the rack is made of copper material and the gear is made of steel material. So the mutual grinding will damage the teeth on the rack, and a lot of copper chips will be produced on the gear and rack.
