this is what I need for my miniatures

Re: this is what I need for my miniatures

Don Evans

Looks nice but the one that you really need is one made for what you are doing not a Hospital. The one that engravers use is sold by GRS. Check them out here:

https://www.grs.com/browse/microscopes-magnifiers-and-lighting/microscopes/

Don

I like the forehead rest thats cool

Re: I like the forehead rest thats cool

mikeee12345

Eye strain usually leads to resting your eyes for short periods of time and the forehead

rest facilitates those short naps while resting the eyes. :-)

Re: this is what I need for my miniatures

Dennis in Southern Oregon

John, I haven’t really thought this through yet, but if you really are interested in getting magnification while turning miniatures, you might want to consider using a camera and monitor system like many of us use for deep hollowing. Advantages over a head mounted magnifier include not having to stick your nose next to the spinning wood and sharp tools. You might have to retrain your muscle memory a bit to allow you to control your tools while looking at a monitor to the side. However, dentists do essentially that all the time.

stereo vs flat 2d image

John K Jordan

A low-power true stereo microscope is a joy to use - there is NO way to compare it to a 2d image on a monitor. I've had one for maybe 40 years and use it quite a bit. I can do extremely delicate work with scalpels and things due to the 3D depth perception it provides. Mine is 15x/30x. Kids love it for looking at bugs and things. I use it in the shop for looking at wood endgrain, examining tool edges, and occasionally for doing self-surgery to cut out deep splinters in my finger.

It would be great with one of the position-able stands shown in the link.

I also have some binocular microscopes that are not stereo but are called "compound" microscopes - they have two eyepieces but one objective lens. These are what you see in medical and laboratories to look at cells and things - typically much higher power, great for analyzing and measuring things but not generally useful for small manual work. The two I have go from 40x to 1000x with the highest power requiring an oil-immersion technique. Kids love to use one to look at tiny moving things in pond water, for peacock feather detail, for bug wings and antenna, and to look at fresh blood cells. I use one to count parasite eggs in llama fecal samples. Good fun.

I took this (fairly poor but perhaps interesting) photo by holding my cell phone up to one of the eyepiece lenses, about 400x I think. The cells are moving in streams in the liquid.

Maybe a stereo camera connected to a stereo VR headset would work for miniatures if you wanted some physical disconnection from the work. However, the hand/eye coordination with a low-power stereo microscope comes naturally.

JKJ

John nailed it- stereo vision is needed

john lucas

Once I got down to a certain size I found that just regular magnifiers didn't work and cameras with one lens have the same problem. You lose your depth perception and when your building things that are only .030" tall you really really need depth perception. I bought a cheap 20X stereo microscope. then I found that the lathe vibration (even though there is almost none on my powermatic) was just enough to cause problems so I mounted the whole thing on a wooden stand independant of the lathe. It is a jury rigged set up but worked. So when I saw that huge thing at the hospital I was drooling. Of course it's way way way out of my leaque and I don't know if I will ever work that small again.