my great victorian microscope hunt

so this year, as suggested by my mom & being very in my wheelhouse of gifts i like to give - i am restoring (to the best of my limited ability) the vintage microscope my dad has. my dads dad was a nuclear physicist who liked collecting vintage science paraphernalia. he had a lot of vintage books on science, along with a level, a set of metric weights, and a microscope. many years ago now a part of the level was lost, and a part of the microscope. the level piece has since been replaced, but not the microscope. so ive taken it on as what ill do, along with polishing the brass of the whole thing too

i thought it would be relatively easy, like it should be easy enough to find the general microscope type and find a part for it on ebay, i mean all the info is written right there on the microscope :)

How Wrong I Have Been .

after a week or two of on and off hunting, ive completely re-learned everything about this microscope and its a lot bigger task than i thought it would be to get a replacement piece. theres a lot of pieces of the same brand and ~general? era up on ebay, but they all have part numbers ascribed to them which i have no way of parsing and which it seems theres no way of learning about from my end. ill explain

what i have learned about the microscope is this:

its from the Bausch & Lomb Optical Company - this is engraved on it in several places.

it has a number on a plate on the base marked 26564 - presumably a serial number because theres nothing else it seems like it would be, and the number gets no results for a patent or microscope model number. if the serial code information here is correct, (which its unsourced, and other places parrot this information but all seemingly from one source so idk) this means this microscope was made in 1884 . which is just awesome (/s) because the earliest information i can find on any B&L microscopes is from 1892. (illustrated catalogue from B&L on the internet archive)

its seemingly a monocular microscope, having just the singular tube (and it doesnt seem B&L made binocular microscopes until much much later anyway) and with the paltry information available, seems to be the closest to the Harvard Microscope model described in the 1892 catalogue. there are some tiny aesthetic differences (a flat arm vs a dip in the arm), and in particular the draw tube for the 1892 one(s) include numbers. which, from photos of similar microscopes to this one (though it has been very difficult to find an exact match??) seems to be untrue of this model. so maybe its something that was added later? or maybe im just finding the wrong pictures

looking at the harvard model, theres a page that discusses it more in depth which helps. the aesthetic differences are more clear - the missing dip inwards on the inside of the arm, the knob on the arm being higher up, and the base is unpainted brass where ours seems to be brass painted black(?). this page also helpfully directs to the 1885 patent, which seems to be the closest thing so far of all to what i have and the most actually helpful. it is one year ahead of the supposed year of make of the one i have, but its the closest i can get at all. theres an illustrated catalogue from 1911 in the smithsonian i also looked at, and they supposedly have one from 1879 which would be amazing to look at but is completely unavailable. because of course

the illustrated catalogues helped in understanding the pieces of the microscope, but the patent helped me see a bit more of the insides. since theres no information on taking these things apart, or how the individual pieces are meant to fit together quite literally, the patent shows how the insides and outsides line up and labels each section so i know more of what im actually looking for. before i was looking at entire eye tubes, which i already have - what i need is the eye lens / eye lens cap. and searching for that has helped, but now im faced with a lot of very expensive pieces that i dont know if theyll even fit the microscope because they may well be a totally different era

there are smaller eye pieces that run up to like, 50$ at the most so i might experiment buying a couple of those. but i have a sinking feeling its gonna be the 100-300$ ones that will actually be whats needed, but i have no way of knowing if im buying the right one or not until i have it on the microscope and then thatll be an awesome wasted 200$ T_T when im out of a job and scraping for every penny TT_TT

idk how to get pics to work on spacehey cuz i keep doing stuff and then the pictures dont show up so im not gonna attach any of my microscope here. but i will say these are the most similar ones i could find pics of online:

image one, image two, image three, image four

and now i look closer, i thought there was a difference of make in the arm knob but i think its that this arm knob is missing the lower casing. FML lol. i really think i might have to just polish it up and then pull dad into the research as my gift rather than getting to surprise him with it