Wollaston / Nomarski DIC prism creation for microscopy...difficult?
Hi all! I recently lucked out by finding a great older microscope at an estate sale and paid not very much for it. Evidently myself and the estate sale people did not know what that microscope had on it, which was a DIC setup (differential interference contrast). In the intervening months I have been in Olympus microscopy groups, getting a DIC setup is very high on the list of many in those groups. That sentiment is mirrored in Canon and Leica microscopy groups. DIC setups on Ebay sell in the thousands of dollars, and do not come up very often.
Is creating the prisms and analyzers for this type of setup difficult to do? Everything else about the microscopy setup can be 3D printed or machined, it's just the optics that people can't find.
https://www.olympus-lifescience.com/en/microscope-resource/primer/techniques/dic/dicconfiguration/