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I agree with Mark.  Acetone will eat any rubbers/sealers/epoxies holding
your lens together.  I only use acetone on mirrors out on the optical bench
that are held in place with friction mounts (i.e. no epoxy).  For anything
glued or sealed I use high-purity methanol and lens tissues.

Craig


On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 7:09 AM, Mark Cannell <[log in to unmask]>wrote:

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> From direct experience, I urge a note of caution with acetone, you may
> degrade the lens mounting glue and risk spreading it over the lens.
>
> Regards Mark
>
>
> On 17/03/2011, at 12:40 PM, Cammer, Michael wrote:
>
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>> I don't think there really is one general solvent.  When I began doing
>> biological microscopy about 20 years ago the immersion oils all seemed to be
>> made of the same stuff and easily cleaned with just about any organic
>> solvent stronger than ethanol.  This is no longer the case.  For instance,
>> the new Nikon oil for TIRF gets thick and is completely impervious to any of
>> the aqueous cleaners.  It is resistant to what we practically considered to
>> be the universal solvent of organics, acetone, and also to ethanol.  But
>> dehydrated methanol works great.  On the other hand, the Zeiss oils, when
>> fresh, clean up fine with their aqueous cleaning solutions and when old and
>> dripped all over the turret and such, with acetone.  The old standby in the
>> lab, Cargill Labs type DF, cleans up with any inorganic solvent.  Of course,
>> in one lab the gospel was xylene because, well, we scientists tend to be
>> superstitious or traditional.  As for ether, one benefit of using it, we
>> were told years ago by someone at Zeiss, is that it evaporates so fast that
>> it reduces the chances of dissolving the glue holding in the front glass of
>> the objective.  Is this really a problem?  I've never had one of these front
>> lenses come loose.  Now I tend to use 1:1 acetone/methanol and cotton swabs
>> and/or lens tissue following in the footsteps of Spectraphysics service who
>> uses this to clean their mirrors and gives us average power of a Watt with
>> 100 fs pulses at 910-920 nm, so I follow by example.
>> -Michael Cammer
>>
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