Estate Sale with Optics

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ray_parkhurst
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Estate Sale with Optics

Post by ray_parkhurst »

I went to the most interesting estate sale I've ever been to yesterday. It was described as a 3-generation sale of tools, and the pics showed a complete machine shop with mills and presses and walls and boxes full of tools. I'm always interested in estate sales with good tools, as I like to pick up small hand tools, milling tools, files, etc that I use in my own shop. This sale was different though. I was overwhelmed with the sheer quantity of tools. Filing cabinets full. Boxes full. And the workshop extended to a tool shop with hundreds of tools on display on the walls, and that extended into a library full of technical books, and that had an upstairs office with drafting and office equipment. Overwhelming! A tool digger/picker's dream sale.

I was the first person to the sale. There was no line to get in, which is very strange these days. It seems they only advertised on Craigslist. Even though I was early, they let me in, so I had the run of the place for 30 minutes or so.

After finding a nice selection of pliers, mills, and files, and an interesting box of different wood samples, I found a few boxes marked "optics". There was a lot of interesting stuff., so I came home with 2 file boxes full of "optics". I spent last night figuring out what was in there, an eclectic mix of visible, laser, IR, and opthalmogy stuff. I ended up putting only a few things aside to keep:

- A small Newport shop microscope head
- An Olympus 15.7x objective
- A nice 10x/0.3 finite objective
- Some microfiche and ultra-microfiche slides
- Some prisms, though I am not sure what I'll use them for
- Some 70mm lens blanks from 0.25D to 2.5D

Perhaps of interest to some folks here may be the file box full of Edmund Scientific component lenses. Hundreds of them with wide range of diameters and focal lengths. I am not really sure what to do with them! I'd appreciate input from folks to gauge interest as my first thought is to do a rough catalog and then put them up on the Equipment Exchange.

There were also a selection of Fresnel field lenses with different focal lengths and diameters. I'd like to hear if anyone has interest in Fresnel lenses, maybe for focused lighting or other apps?

Anyway, thought I'd write about the best estate sale I've seen yet. As it turns out, my local Electronics Swap is still closed, and won't open now at least until March 2022. The pandemic shut it down for 2 years! The Redondo Beach Electronics Swap opened up last weekend, but I was unable to go. Maybe end of this month I'll go, but I'm a bit reluctant to plan anything given our present and continuing situation. For now, I'll probably just keep doing the estate sales, though all future sales are going to be anticlimactic versus yesterday's blockbuster.

Lou Jost
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Re: Estate Sale with Optics

Post by Lou Jost »

Congratulations, your dedication paid off again!

I think fresnel lenses that transmit UV light would be very useful for home-made UV flashes (by taking off the protective plastic front lens). Some flashes in the past do have UV-transmitting fresenl lenses so they do exist.

ray_parkhurst
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Re: Estate Sale with Optics

Post by ray_parkhurst »

Lou Jost wrote:
Mon Sep 06, 2021 10:30 am
Congratulations, your dedication paid off again!

I think fresnel lenses that transmit UV light would be very useful for home-made UV flashes (by taking off the protective plastic front lens). Some flashes in the past do have UV-transmitting fresenl lenses so they do exist.
Thanks Lou! I will check these Fresnel lenses with a UV torch (I love saying torch instead of flashlight).

I also forgot to mention another part of the sale proceeds...it seems the guy was an optics tester, and had put together a collection of scanner/microfiche/etc lenses. He even made a couple of trays with drilled holes and foam beneath to hold the lenses. Unfortunately, the heirs had a "family and friends" sale, and some lenses were gone, while the remaining lenses were in disarray, so his original identifications are now useless as most all the lenses have no useful markings. I ended up having to pull them all out and will go through them to see if anything is useful. Or maybe I'll just put the whole group up for sale and let someone else sort through them! We'll see what I have time for.

Lou Jost
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Re: Estate Sale with Optics

Post by Lou Jost »

Thanks for checking the UV transmittance.

Drawers full of scanner lenses!!! Did you take any notes/photos of the IDs? Even if unconnected to their lenses, we might be able to judge the quality of the set. And if we find out that there is something really special in the set, even if you don't know which lens it is, you could do a lottery with the lenses. Could be fun. And very appropriate, since that is more or less what we do anyway when buying some of those kinds of lenses.

ray_parkhurst
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Re: Estate Sale with Optics

Post by ray_parkhurst »

Lou Jost wrote:
Mon Sep 06, 2021 11:47 am
Thanks for checking the UV transmittance.

Drawers full of scanner lenses!!! Did you take any notes/photos of the IDs? Even if unconnected to their lenses, we might be able to judge the quality of the set. And if we find out that there is something really special in the set, even if you don't know which lens it is, you could do a lottery with the lenses. Could be fun. And very appropriate, since that is more or less what we do anyway when buying some of those kinds of lenses.
Turns out, most of the lenses have some sort of marking to correlate to the tray position. Some have the tray position, while others have more info.

Here is the list of ID's on the two trays. I have put a * next to lenses I can identify. The rest are unidentified:

Tray #1
Rodenstock 20mm
DO/Kowa 20mm
Miyauchi 20mm f2.8 *
Miyauchi 13mm
JML 20mm *
Montron 12.9mm
DASA 25mm
MDI Microlite 19.6mm
Caron 15.5mm
MTC 12.9mm
Quantor 34.8mm
Quantor 20mm
Realist H
WSI 13mm *
DO 15.5mm
Kodak 22mm
Polaroid Minute Maker
Toyo 25mm
DO 20mm
DO 25mm *
Toyo 30mm
Toyo 28mm
Toyo 39mm
JML 17mm *
Rolyn 25mm
WSI 25mm *
JML 29mm *
? 33.6mm
WSI 20mm *
Kodak 63.5mm
Kokak Trimlite
Minolta 20mm *
JML 15.5mm
? 19.3mm *
JML 13.25mm
? 20mm *
Schneider 25mm
DO 15.5mm f3.3 *
Rodenstock 25mm

Tray #2
JML 25mm *
JML 15.3mm
Toyo 15mm f2.8
Toyo 13.3mm *
JML 13.3mm
Toyo 13mm f2.4 *
Toyo 25mm f2.8 *
WSI 25mm *
MU 27mm *

The rest of this tray is only identified by maker, mostly JML, Toyo, and MU, which makes sense since there are multiples of some types such as the MU 27mm f2.8, Toyo 13.3mm, and JML 25mm.

So bottom line, out of 100 positions in the two trays, there were 55 lenses, and I was able to identify 46 of them, with 9 unidentified, and 30 lens positions with markings having no lens correlated. Many of the ones "missing" were probably easy to identify, such as the Rodenstock, Schneider, Kodak, etc. Some missing ones looked interesting in that I don't know the manufacturers at all and would like to have known if the lens quality was good. These are the Montron, DASA, MDI Microlite, Caron, MTC, and Quantor. One of the Miyauchi's is still here, so that will be interesting. There are several WSI lenses as well. Anyone know this brand?

In addition to the mixed trays of lenses, I also found a box of ~75 small lenses that have FL in the 15-20mm range, and are only marked "Made In Japan". They appear very sharp when used as loupes, but that's a fairly low bar. Most are new in plastic bags, with one tray of 50 still in the tray. I hope they work well! Will report back on them.

Lou Jost
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Re: Estate Sale with Optics

Post by Lou Jost »

Fascinating, new ground!

ray_parkhurst
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Re: Estate Sale with Optics

Post by ray_parkhurst »

I checked a bunch of these Fresnel lenses and they all seem to pass and focus UV. I used a Convoy S2+ (365nm) torch with a tennis ball as a fluorescent subject. I checked FL's from 37mm up to 90mm and all gave a good focus spot with WD correlated to the FL. I only did qualitative measurements. Let me know any requests as I have it all out on the bench.

Lou Jost
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Re: Estate Sale with Optics

Post by Lou Jost »

Thanks, I'll send you a PM. That's fantastic news.

ray_parkhurst
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Re: Estate Sale with Optics

Post by ray_parkhurst »

Digging through some more boxes, I found a few more items of potential interest:

A few eyepieces that are marked in focal lengths rather than powers. Is there an application that comes to mind which would have eyepieces of this characteristic?

A few ground glass windows of different sizes and shapes and colors. I assume these are for focal plane imaging.

A few Melles Griot micro lenses, and a micro prism.

I did a rough organization of the many individual lenses by focal length. It looks like whoever bought these was creating an optical lab, as there are many different focal lengths, with very few having more than one or two examples. There is also a box of negative FLs across a wide range.

Overall this was quite a haul from an estate sale dedicated to "tools".

I'm planning to test a few of the lenses, especially those with multiples of same type. Will hopefully post some results soon.

I did take a look at the ultra-microfiche slides. They are marked "Ultrastrip, Microform Data Systems Inc" and "2000 letter size pages at 210x reduction". There are five 35mm slides in each strip, each with 400 pages of identical info. Here are a few pages taken at ~5x with the Olympus objective from the sale:
.
DSC00001_PSMS_2.JPG
.
And here is a 100% crop:
.
DSC00001_PSMS_3.JPG
.
I'm not sure how useful these are, especially shot with the unknown optic, but they are interesting. There are also many pages of standard microfiche, and I plan to shoot a couple pages to see how clear they come out. And finally there are a couple of photo resolution targets that are not in great shape but may prove interesting as well.

ray_parkhurst
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Re: Estate Sale with Optics

Post by ray_parkhurst »

I thought I had posted the following but I guess I never pressed "Submit"...

I shot one of the resolution targets with the 5x objective. See the full frame shot below, and a 100% detail of a corner sub-target below that.

Does anyone know what the numbering scheme is for resolution targets like these?
DSC00005_PSMS_2.JPG
DSC00005_PSMS_3.JPG

J_Rogers
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Re: Estate Sale with Optics

Post by J_Rogers »

Not sure if you ever found the answer to your question, but it's a NBS-1010/ISO #2 target. Similar to the famous USAF-1951 but 5 lines instead of 3, and the resolution is printed in cycles/mm rather than using groups & elements and needing to look it up. The grey text is designed to be imaged in front of a white background to better estimate contrast loss in the optical system.

https://www.iso.org/standard/36569.html

ray_parkhurst
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Re: Estate Sale with Optics

Post by ray_parkhurst »

J_Rogers wrote:
Mon Oct 11, 2021 4:35 pm
Not sure if you ever found the answer to your question, but it's a NBS-1010/ISO #2 target. Similar to the famous USAF-1951 but 5 lines instead of 3, and the resolution is printed in cycles/mm rather than using groups & elements and needing to look it up. The grey text is designed to be imaged in front of a white background to better estimate contrast loss in the optical system.

https://www.iso.org/standard/36569.html
Thanks for the info @J_Rogers. I did not pay for the full document so could not review the details, but it makes sense the numbers would specify frequency. However, for sure they do not refer to cycles/mm. The entire target shown is only ~1mm across. Do you know of another similar standard that describes a target intended for much higher resolution measurements?

J_Rogers
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Re: Estate Sale with Optics

Post by J_Rogers »

I'm sure there is probably some NIST standard hidden behind a paywall, but I dont know of any for certain. It is rather sad when you think of the shear volume of standards and the corresponding price per one.

Four different vendors with certified targets all show the "official" size to be 101.6mm square. Applied Image has the highest version of the chart (same size) at 512/mm & Edmund Optics has 128/mm. I have seen the USAF 1951 chart scaled by some factor X and used, with the only difference being lacking a certification. So if I had to guess it is a scaled down version of the ISO #2 chart.

-Not drawn to scale. If you were to measure the largest(easiest) two resolutions & then average the scale factor it should be rather close to the real thing. S is the inverse of the printed number on the test target.. Since this is a clear slide, if you really cared to know "...The minimum difference in visual diffuse transmission density between the base and lines shall be 3.0" per the 2006 standard. The resolution increments were decided based off a Renard Series of 20 steps (ISO 3:1973) yielding and average of 12.2% change per step.
iso-2-dimensions.jpg

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