A friend of mine has a Brunel MX-6T stereo microscope, which is a handy and economical instrument but had an annoying feature. If you look at the Brunel catalogue page you will see what I mean - the binocular head is back-to-front! Well, that's my opinion anyway. Why should one have the stand pillar up the nose and the mains flex towards one when using the MX?
Some similar microscopes have a rotatable head with a clamp screw to hold it still in use. This has the advantage that it's easy to rotate the head so that the eye-pieces face backwards for stowing the instrument in its case. Sadly, the MX doesn't have a rotatable head like that but it is an easy job to remove the head and the two prisms that are revealed, rotate all 180 degrees and re-attach. The result is a much more friendly instrument to use!
First, check if the eye-piece retaining screws have been removed. If so, remove the eye-pieces so they don't fall out later! Remove the cap from the top of the stand pillar. Then remove the head.
The picture above shows which cross-head screws to remove to take the top off the head and the picture below shows which screws to undo to remove the prisms.
Re-assemble, having rotated the prisms as a pair 180 degrees.
Here's what it looks like after the operation - yes, it's like a normal stereo microscope!
What's the down-side of doing this? Well, the case supplied will only fit if you remove the 10x eye-pieces. You can replace them by plugs to keep out the dust or, as in this case, use the 20x eye-pieces, which don't project so far from the tubes.
I also found that the mains flex was a tight squeeze and needed to be bent to allow the case door to shut so I removed the long cable grommet, reamed out the hole a few mm and fitted a sub-miniature plug and socket arrangement - they're dark blue, as you can see above. The parts came from Farnell Electronic Components Ltd, tel: 0113 263 6311 (order codes: free socket 147-074 and chassis plug 147-077). As this modification involves changes to the mains wiring it is not a job to be undertaken unless you are a competent electrician.
Next job is to fix a dimmer control... oh yes, and a bright white LED!
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