Laser Alignment for Microscopes Using 3D Printed Parts

A few months back I was working on a custom microscope that required several sections to be aligned. The camera to be centered on it’s axis and aligned to the objective, the excitation wide-field illuminator to be aligned to the back aperture of the objective (and for that alignment to be coaxial), and finally, a laser source to be aligned into the back aperture as well.

Before the on site work, I decided to cook up a little “starter” jig, that would screw into the objective threads, and easily identify whether the laser was in fact coaxial. It worked fairly well, so I figured I’d share the model for anyone who wants it. You can find the f3d, STEP and STL files here on Github – Note the threads modeled work decently, but are my own mod job off of another fine pitch close-ish thread. They worked great when printed using my Prusa MK3, so I figure most people using the model should have no issues. I’ll probably make one for Olympus RMS threads when the need arises.

Some additional screenshots of the tool.