The Zygo NewView 200 Microscope Stand with bottled water for scale.
Last week I came across one of those unbelievable deals where you can't seem to press the buy-it-now button fast enough. How good of a deal was it, well I spend over $150 on fuel and had to drive 763 miles round trip to pick up my gently used $50 microscope stand.
It turns out the Ebay seller, was getting rid of the stand, from a Zygo NewView 200 Interferometer (surface structure analyzer) microscope, since he no longer needed it, having purchased it, just for the special XY stage that came with it.
Luckily, the fine and coarse focus movements are in excellent condition, so over the next weeks and months I will cover the build-up to setup the stand for macro photography. This project will be easy for someone to do on their own, since I will be using only easy-to-find low-cost parts for the build, and when I say low cost, I mean really low-cost.
Before anyone goes out, and starts looking for a hard-to-find used Zygo microscope, I would recommend instead to look for the same stand used by Nikon for the MM-11 Measurescope. These are very common (there are six used MM-11 units on Ebay as I write this), so with some patience you can find them for really good prices on the used market. There are things to look out when looking for one of these, so I will be covering in the next part of this build-up series.