I have taken several AO scopes apart down to the individual nuts,
bolts, and bearings. My qualifications for this is having done the
same thing to several bicycles (using "anybody's bike book" by Tom
Cuthbertson as a guide) and having overhauled four or five automobile
engines using the shop manuals (and Muir's book on VWs in the case of
one VW and one Porsche) as guides. With this background in fine
tooling :) I felt totally qualified to deal with the mechanics of a
microscope. The exploded views from the manuals on Steve Neeley's
page were used for the scopes.

The bottom line is that if you are at all mechanical, you can do it.
You will occasionally have the odd spring loaded bearing jump out and
roll under your heaviest piece of furniture (as Muir predicts
somewhere), but if you are very careful, you can keep that to a
minimum. You can get into serious trouble if you open something up
that affects optical alignment. You just have to think about the
consequences of various moves. It is usually obvious what will do
this. Unbolting various dovetails is usually a dangerous step.

Your problem is with the XY mechanisms. This is a completely
detachable item on the 150 and cannot mess up your optical alignment.
Removing two bolts from the side of the stage puts it in your hands.
Each direction involves two race and ball-bearing assemblies. The
ball bearings are constrained by spacers that ride along with them.
You probably have to loosen screws on one or more races, hold the race
moderately tight against the bearings while retightening the screws.
On an aseembly I happen to have here, this looks like a job of
loosening and retightening 4 screws in the direction towards and away
from the back of the scope, and the same operation in the direction
across the scope from side to side. The amount of available
adjustment is small (holes for the heads of the screws are very
slightly larger than the heads themselves), but is designed to be
adequate.

From

http://www.reichertms.com/ref_man.php

you can download the reference and parts manual for the 150. It gives
a completely inadequate parts view of the XY assembly. I guess this
assembly was considered to be easier to replace than repair, or
perhaps the 150 was not regarded as a scope that would be used by the
technically knowledgeable. It was sold as a student scope.

My assembly is a bit stiff and I plan to "evantually" open it up,
clean out the old grease, regrease and reassemble it. "Eventually"
probably means "you should live so long" so I would not wait for me to
relay my experiences.

If you are not that mechanical (no backgrounds with hot rods,
motorcycles or bicycles) and the discussion of bearings and races
means nothing to you, then just keep and eye out on ebay. These
things show up irregularly and sell for reasonable amounts.





--- In Microscope@yahoogroups.com, Mike <hml@...> wrote:
>
> Thanks, loafer. And thanks to Scott, too, who also responded. I've
> scoured the page you mentioned, as well as many other pages, and there
> doesn't seem to be much discussion of mechanical stage slack. So, I
> would find it helpful to know if this is something that everyone just
> ignores. I will probably make a stab at partially disassembling the
> stage mechanism to see what I can learn. More specifically, the problem
> is that the mechanism levers the slide upward when the X-Y knob is
touched.
>