CHAPTER 16 Ten Tips and Tricks to Handle and Clean Your Microscope 97
How to Avoid Dirt
First rule to keep your microscope clean is to use it with clean hands only. Avoiding
eating and drinking is not just a critical thing to do in safety laboratories, but
it also helps to avoid a dirty microscope. Always keep your microscope covered
with the dust cover when it is not in use.
Things You Need to Clean your
Microscope
The goal is the complete removal of dust and dirt without leaving any residue of
the cleaning agent and without damaging the surfaces. You need the following
utensils and agents:
✔✔Long, thin wooden sticks, preferably of bamboo. Go out for a Chinese dinner
and take the chopsticks home with you.
✔✔High-purity cotton
✔✔Absorbent polyester swabs for optical cleaning, or cotton swabs.
✔✔Soft facial tissues
✔✔Microfiber cloth
✔✔Dust blower
✔✔Distilled water
✔✔Diluted dishwashing liquid
✔✔Solvent for the removal of greasy or oily dirt such as analytical grade
n-hexane
Cleaner‘s naphtha, white spirit, petroleum ether and others are trivial
names for petroleum fractions containing n-hexane.
✔✔Only for coverslips: pure acetone.