A very special German mystery (1 Viewer)

I need the assistance of the Teutonic binocular collectors here.

I won the auction with some
Wards / Wide Angle / 7x35 / Made in Germany / Featherweight
binoculars that looked incredibly similar to the
7x35 / JB-4 Toei Kogaku (sold under different names) / 10 Degree
extra-wides that are my favorite of all extra-wides.


When I got them, the focuser was even harder, more stable,
(it has a brown oiled-hardened tool-steel spindle, for g--'s sake!)
and the eyecup far slicker to use than the Toei Kogakus.
And the view....wow!
The JB-4s are very good, but these suckers have an incredible field.
The case is a cut above as well, and in good shape.
The good shape I will attribute to "back of the closet under clothes"
storage, which leaves some binocs eerily fresh after 5-7 decades.

The chassis is the ZCF style but with the objective screwed directly in
as it is for most ZCF 6x30s. Just like the Toei Kogaku 7x35/10-D
(which might be a copy?) They weigh within an ounce of each other.

So...what German binoculars (50s or 60s maybe) could these really be?
I know Sears, Ward's, and KMart all had Steiners before, but these
are really something else. They have no coating for the outer eyepiece surface,
by the way. This was common practice before hard coating, and no big deal.
The Toei Kogakus have hard pale violet...this is a later development.

What do I have here?

OPTIC_NUT,

Your binocular was made by Hertel & Reuss. See this auction item.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/166938355/vintage-german-binoculars-hertel-reuss

These could be bought very cheaply when the importer stopped handling them in the mid 1980s. I bought several different models from Sierra Trading Post brand new for (as I recall) around $70-80. Even then the exterior eye lens glass was not coated. Frankly, I thought they were so poor I returned them.

Henry

Interesting...given today's 'picture'.
I can't use them for more than 30 sec. in the bright light.

Late yesterday they were impressive in the dim light,
but today there was this 'super-real' irritation that can't be
attributed to collimation...that is OK to 7 inches from the eyes.

They bug me in the sunlight,
especially strong sun and dark shade, dappled.
It didn't seem to be chromatics or any blurring,
so I strapped them onto the tripod plank, aimed for
a bright rock, and blew up the image with a 6x16 monocular.

What's happening is multiple ghost lines around
a sharp step in brightness. Must be uncoated glass
combined with an eyepiece design that would be ravaged by that.
I'll call that 'chattering'. The chattering goes worse near the edge.
Dang.

What a shame....mechanically, everything else is right.
The focuser is awesome.

Some of the old ones uncoated inside don't chatter like this..
This is a bad waste. Well, I only lost $20, with S+H. I might
mount an effort to swap in fully coated EPs, but your fl's have to
be very close for that to work.

So...I took them apart.
More excellent machining, blacking, and fitting combined with
some deficient materials, like lithium grease that had dried to dust.
At least it wasn't turned to glue.

The eyepiece is 6 elements in 3 achromatic groups, an advanced Erfle.
The middle group is coated.

Since the chattering (a form of ghosting?) was strong at the edges and didn't
occur center-field, I tried the eyepieces out on an f/12 telescope, an f/10 scope,
and a f/6 richfield/spotter. Perfect 70-degree field with excellent contrast
at f/10 and f/12 (like the Meade super-wides), edge to edge.
At f/6, there is chatter showing up after 90% of the field.

So....over about f/8 in a telescope (binoculars are about f4),
I have high salvage value in two telescope eyepieces, about 18mm.

As binoculars, though, they were a tragic clash of some fine parts,
a great design, and some badly ill-conceived economizing in production.
I'm saving the body, with its nice BAK4 coated prisms and good objective
and alignment, hoping to get independent-focus EPs with the right threads,
or get bold and make cast threads. I'll save that project for later.

At least I can turn the $20 into ~$120 worth of EPs.