sorry to be offtopic but does any of you know a way to get back into an instagram account? I somehow lost the account password. I would appreciate any help you can offer me.
Plus one vote for restoration! Would love to see long format videos of the entire tear down and rebuild of this device.Send some assemblies out to the community for repair. Keep up the great work Tom! Looking forward to part 2.
Come on, Tom. You know you're not going to give up on this beautiful machine. I'll bet you've already got the brass rod in the lathe to replace those damage screw covers. And there has to be some filing involved at some point or it wouldn't be a Lipton build. Can't wait for part 2. 😉
I'd go for a "last part" disassembly and clean up. This Leitz gadget is not rocket surgery. Leitz had great engineers back in the day. Great engineers do the difficult simply. You have the talent, tools, and care but you may not have the time. If you have the time, do it and bring us ham-fisted fumblers along. Maybe bring in an optics buddy to demonstrate the methods and tools of optical work. I bet you could restore that wonderful relic to as-new condition and accuracy.
There are a lot of things inside there that seems to be bits and bobs from optical breadboard setups. Maybe Thor Labs or Edmund Optics has clues to things like thumbscrews and lens mounts/clamps. If nothing else, it can be restomodded to some more modern bits - if I can 3D print a Raman Spectrometer than we can probably find something cool to do that is also worth their time (maybe auction the new device for charity or something - the best lab gear is custom lab gear, you know it's true) if it can't be easily saved by trying non-invasive material replacement techniques like reverse electrolysis or whatever the technical term is for putting material back while removing corrosion/oxidation like those folks that buy old iron stuff from yard sales and use a battery charger to pull the oxidation off and replace some of the material that was lost, among methods.
@@russellzauner atom by atom reconstruction is not what the dude showin the dividing head is about. He bought the thing to see if he could save the iron for use or cash. Maybe if all of us make enough noise he will put the stifflegdeadlift ironplate back to dialing blondeones. Afterall, the guy managed to save an optical bubble level thingy that cost the bolts on this dividing head.
OMG!!! I am an electrical contractor at one of Corning's precision optics plants and I came across one of these in one of the labs the other day . I couldn't for the hell of me figure out what it was so thank you for this video
Come on Tom you have to restore it, I can’t imagine what the cost would be to manufacture something like that nowadays, it’s a beautiful piece of engineering art, get it up and running.
The tooling dept. I worked in had one of those with a face plate. It was used only in the Moore Jig Bore room. Tom, you would be the only guy other than the Jig Bore man, the company would let touch it! Cool as all get out...LIKE IT!
Tom, when pulling plates like the ones you have there on the rear of your unit, grab a couple of mag bases and stick them on. Magnetic power, and instant handles. Best of both worlds. Cheers, Cliff
I'm glad you made the statement that its too far gone to restore, Tom. I'm watching and thinking, geez thats a mess. Ive reshuttered a couple leica cameras, and cla a lot more. I do know that if they had a long screw in a particular place its there for a reason. they didnt just make do with what was in stock. they're damn fussy to get back where they need to be, and surface rst makes that unobtainable I would think. enjoyed a lot. thanks for sharing.
Beautiful dividing head. Considering the accuracy of the faying surfaces it might have been contaminated by salt air. OMG the quality of that baby is Beautiful
Oh, and for any fellas it might help - when you see "ie" in a German word, it's pronounced "ee" - the "ei" is as already noted, pronounced a a long 'i' as in the example "lights." So for Tom's pronunciation, the word Leitz (pron. "Lights") would need to spelled "Lietz." (Pron. "Leets").
If there was ever a machine built that was destined to for Tom Lipton's shop. This instrument is it. I agree with Tony B. that you will probably attempt to restore this machine to its former glory. You know it will always be in your thoughts until you do. Not to mention it will make for some interesting YT video. Be well, be safe and stay healthy.
20:30 for pulling onto such flat surfaces, I use a suction cup salvaged from a car GPS windshield support. Quite powerfull and can be found for free in e-waste.
I kept thinking "suction" or "big magnet" while watching that -- I hadn't thought of a cheap and handy source of a suction cup where there's enough flat surface to attach to. Simpler and cheaper than the schemes that were going through my mind.
While it's apart, replace the dowel pins with pins that have threads for a slide hammer to pull them out easy. In case it ever has to come back apart you are ahead of the game. Whenever I am rebuilding something I always make sure to do it, made life easiermore than once.
Thanks for a peak inside. That answered a lot of questions I forgot I had. As a kid in the mid 1970s, the engineers at Caterpillar Tech Center in Mossville use to give me pamphlets and brochures. Leitz had detailed technical advertisements. I never understood the split optics until seeing your video. Thanks. Makes a lot of sense. I got to see a Leitz divider head in the wild when I worked at Cincinnati Milacron. It is an impressive unit that speaks a new universe of money. The image sharpness and clarity of the scale was really surprising as I was use to dull and hard to read.
I’m sure he could. It doesn’t look that bad to me either. My guess is it’s not worth enough money, or it’s not worth the time it would take. Also seems like something with a very narrow use case that probably doesn’t apply to what he does.
@@Kc12v140 To me it seems that he is just thinking it's outside his ability to deal with the optics. Getting those properly aligned after disassembly is no simple task. I think he could probably do it though.
I love it back in the early 80s I had the pleasure of using one of these. In a tool and die shop in Massachusetts we made carbide tooling for early rivet manufacturing equipment. Blast from the past
I will never use one of these, or even have a use for one, but when I see the precision and care in manufacture and the very high quality I can't help but hope that you can bring it back and restore it to use. Absolutely love your channel by the way.
Perhaps reconstruction may be possible. Please Mr. Lipton get "your partners in crime", Gotteswinter and Renzetti, into the loop. You 3 routinely work to the tolerances that MARVELOUS piece requires. Very tight budget here or not, I'd entertain a Go Fund Me effort to save 1 of the better efforts by Leitz/Wetzlar. Human operated stuff like that is what made the initial efforts at automation remotely possible.
Yeah, anything is possible if you apply your max efforts to it, but when it's finished and polished up what would you do with it?....a collectors piece?.....hardly worth the effort to have it sitting on the shelf in your workshop for the next time you need to super inspect a series of divisions you did with a cheap BS-0 dividing head.......I think this one is going to be put back together and sold or given to someone who likes museum pieces that were good years ago in a clean room but are now unreliable as a testing piece of apparatus......how can you fault a piece of work when the test equipment is faulty?
I remember these indexers turning up regularly in the 1980's. They were used by a company in the Tampa area that built inertial guidance hardware for ICBM's. I acquired a badly corroded version to tear down and remember the uniquely designed spherical race spindle ball bearings.
Fascinating! I too fix old machines from time to time (and I have a "new" one to fix). Hope I can live up to your standards.... will try! :) Slow and gentle (but stubborn) approach goes a long way...
In addition to the parallel nature of gun smithing screw drivers I hear that it is important to have them the length of the slot as well. Mark Novak speaks to this on his youtube channel
Looking at the inside almost had me crying. I have the same Ellis you have, and it does a very good job, for what it is. But this is pretty much the last great combination between the mechanical and optical arts for this type of device before computers made it obsolete. I could also feel, in my chest, the torque you used on the screws every time you turned them.
As an enthusiast for mechanics, your videos are always awesome to watch! As a novice: I built a mini CNC Milling Machine from scratch - maybe you enjoy watching it too :)
A ZIP Code is a postal code used by the United States Postal Service (USPS). Introduced in 1963. Prior to that there were 2-digit "zones" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_Code
West Germany is a dead give-away of its age. Either way, gorgeous machine. If i had one, in its off days, it would sit in my room so i can look at it. :D Those illuminations scream want for a modern "hack" where they're powered by a few button cell batteries. Those wires kind of uglify the whole aparatus, and these days those pocket LED key chains are bright enough to blind you, so plenty of power from 3 of those button cells.
@@arnljotseem8794 I ate a few words in my excitement. That kind of plate was pre 90's in my experience. So that narrows it down to the period right in the middle because they didn't start using that kind of name tagging (to my knowledge) right after the war.
I have been fascinated with optical dividing heads forever, and would love to see a full teardown of every component on this, including the optics. Serious question if anyone here is capable of answering it- is there any company left that could reproduce the rotary optical scales on this with equal accuracy in, say, 1/3 size? I know it's totally insane- but I've always wanted a scale functional model of one of these for use on smaller high precision machinery. Because reasons. I'm quite serious. Excellent video Tom! Please go all the way with this, they are one of the black boxes of the machining world.
The same technology is used to make circular divided scales for transits and theodolites, Optical encoder and glass measuring scales for machine tools. Cheers, Tom
Funny, some of my second hand optical tooling also has that same awful "dry" rust that seems to spring from otherwise perfectly intact surfaces. My guess is it's decades of not having anything oily applied for fear of getting it on the optics. And nobody ever wanted to take it apart for lubrication for fear of damaging the optics.
Those screwdriver tips are called hollow ground. Brownell's sells an awesome set of hollow ground 1/4" drive tips that are top of the line. They're pricey but worth it IMO. Plus they come with a lifetime warranty. The tips are also sold individually and they list the widths of each bit on their website. They're definitely worth the investment when working on something with slotted screws that you don't want to bozo up!
That’s an optical micrometer at 24:17. Similar to the one in the Wild T2 theodolite. Two plane-parallel slabs of glass displace the images to enable the fine (arcsecond) readout
Reminds me of my dad disassembling Norden bombsights to salvage the bearings, shafts and gears. I still have a few bits and pieces lying around, but no complete ones anymore.
Really cannot blame anyone for not taking it apart once in awhile to clean and oil.You really want to send it back to it's maker.Cool piece of equipment. Good luck.
Be careful with those boat anchors, Tom! I'm in the market for a Shop Crane because I'm recovering from a back injury obtained from lifting my rotary off my mill and down to a low storage shelf a couple of weeks ago. The probem is that a 12" BP rotary with handle brackets weighs 75% of what I do and the old back just wasn't up to it.
The fact that is says "Made in West Germany" means it was made 1955 or later. Very nice piece ! I have a measurement Microscope from Leitz. They also made a very large Microscope with optical measurement arrangement that could be used as a Jig Borer
as a telescope maker and Physicist I can only say that Leitz was always a tiny little bit nicer than Zeiss, mechanically and optically: Smaller production lines, a bit more manufacture than industrial compound. It is the same way in which Patek Philippe makes neater watches than Rolex. The main thing you can learn from these devices is how to transmit forces without causing deformation or strain. The old guys who constructed these things thought four or five times (rather than twice) before taking a technical decision. Unfortunately, I am fairly certain that the basic accuracy is gone: you will have a very hard time getting that thing back to sub-arcsecond precision.
For resyncing the scales, machine a horseshoe piece with the ends machined inline with each other. Then you can loosen the shafts that they pivot on and with some slight pressure on the "horseshoe" it should bring them back to alignment, then you can snug up the screws on the shafts.
Oh my. You know what happened? A closed box always collects water inside due to temperature cycling. Nowadays such things have a desiccant breather. The mechanism is following: Upon warming the unit, air is expanding inside and is moved out due to increasing pressure. Upon cooling down air is returning back from the outside. If the unit gets cooler than the dew point of the inside water vapour, water drops condensates on the surfaces. Unfortunately, heating again does not dry the inside, the liquid water remains. After many cycles you have enough water for severe corrosion.
On second thoughts: *This might be salvageable!* The thing is this: The reading accuracy comes from the glass scale and the compensation of concentricity errors, alone. Is there anybody you can go to for cleaning up the lenses in the microscope attachment, and then reassembling the thing on an optical bench? Anybody who services optical theodolites will do! At 13:10, you can see that the concentricity errors are compensated in the usual way for theodolite scales: Reading on two opposite sides with a centering error will result in one side reading too high, the other too low by the same amount. Since one side of the division serves as marker for the other, you automatically read the average. *On the arcsecond level, the spindle and the glass circle cannot be regarded as being concentric, anyway.* Trying to achieve this is an unnecessary ambition. The goal must be to make the spindle bearings as stiff and and as true as humanly possible, again *which I am sure you can do*. And the circle must be attached without constraining loads which would distort it. Then the reading arrangement of the glass circle will tolerate a small offset in any direction as intended by the designer. As a final step, you could check the accuracy with an arc second theodolite (Wild T2, Kern DKM2, Zeiss Th2, Zeiss/Jena Theo010, or something of that calibre) like this: /watch?v=3NcIu0EF6lQ
Sorry to correct you Tom, however: Leitz pronounced "Leyetz", sounding in the middle like (pop)-ey(e). West Germany existed between 1949-1990. Opto-metric Tools was incorporated on the 18th of December 1974 as a foreign for profit corporation in New Jersey. Given that the "13" was "pioneered in the 1940s" and abandoned in 1963 for a five-digit code... Something is fishy! So, I'm guessing they moved out of New York in 1974 and the unit age is somewhere between 1949 and 1963.
According to my school German and a few moments of pondering suitable English pronunciation models, I came up with two possible suggestions. The similarly sounding words in my opinion are "LIGHTS" or the often seen "LITES". Maybe I have picked a bit too much of the Australian pronouncing (while visiting there), but these two are the best I could think of.
Beautiful piece of equipment. In hindsight, consider the vintage of equipment particularly when your fascinated by an interesting smell. In some cases seriously toxic chemicals can draw you in. After a chemical has been discontinued you may not have smelled it for years and the smell triggers your memory....drawing you in.
@@RobertWilliams-mk8pl is a poison that was developed during ww2 that smelled exactly like geraniums.. Thankfully it was never used.. Imagine that aye..
@@oxtoolco I usually have mine on toast with a nice cool glass of coolant..😁 Hey thanks for taking the time to put this stuff online, it's hard to find good engineers to learn from these days..
