Cleaning a LOMO R15 (ЛОМО Р15) Frame

So as mentioned in the preceding article about my LOMO ST-12 (ЛОМО СТ-12) Repair I got a new LOMO microscope! A LOMO R15 (ЛОМО Р15) to be precise, in this post I briefly go over cleaning the main frame of it, as mine was dirty and the mechanical parts were hard to operate.

LOMO R15 Base Frame

The green stuff is a grease spillage, where the grease liquefied by heating up and spilled all over the microscope. This indicates that the microscope either sat somewhere hot or on the outside in the sun for a while.

So I started disassembling it, thereby degreasing and cleaning all parts.

I removed and replaced the old grease with new one. I carefully added some grease to it, moved the parts a couple of times and subsequently removed any excess. This ensures that the microscope looks clean. Or at least as clean as can be.

The end result after the cleaning - at least for now - is:

LOMO R15 Base Frame

The moving parts also obviously feel better and easier to operate with the new grease.

Also I do have a MFN-7 (МФН-7) camera tube for it which fits any camera with a M42 thread. The main problem I have is that the standard LOMO objectives have a too high magnification. The lowest one that comes standard with LOMO microscopes is 8x, they also appear to usually come with a 90x oil immersion objective. Especially for taking overview pictures I’ll have to get some smaller objectives in the 3x-4x range. Fortunately the microscope uses standard RMS (DIN EN ISO 8038-1, DIN 58888) objectives.

LOMO R15 Test

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