Well, no... my point in THIS post was that rather than destroying the thing, you should turn it into a victory by retrofitting one of those inexpensive LED rings and designing a nice quiet linear supply to power it.
mnem
*tzzzt*
my good man, i didn’t destroy it, i disassembled it. you, of all people, should recognize the difference.
* worsthorse wanders off to find the coffee.
Well, disassembling it and scattering its parts to the 4 corners of the
earth house like the remains of
The Blood Queen is not exactly the same thing.
Once you've finished with your current obsession (or at least grown so annoyed with it you hide it away in a closet in defense of your own sanity) I suggest you
reassemble it and retrofit an LED ring to it.
In the meantime, you may want to go shopping on AliEx & eBay for
"White LED Ring"; they make them in lots of sizes up to about 120mm or so for car "angel eyes" (these are a crap shoot; some are scary bright and some are crap) and effect lighting for photography (these are designed for illumination and are my first choice if I can find the size I need) in the US$3-8 range; as I said, a pittance.
Anything larger than that tends to quickly get expensive, but they also make rings EXPLICITLY to replace the old Circline fluorescents
(search Circline LED or T9 LED) for two or three pittances; typically in the US$15-20 range. Those will usually come with a bezel of some sort as well and you can be sure they're going to have nice bright LEDs as they're designed for illumination, but will also come with a pretty noisy PWM converter. You'll need to make a nice quiet linear supply with a resistor ballast to power those.
Alternately, most of these smaller illumination-purpose rings will provide great light... I've seen 100mm 12W rings for like $5-8. But you have to be willing to cut them into thirds or quarters with a hacksaw and make short jumpers for a few traces to connect them so they fit the right size circle.
I've done a number of these; once you get it done and see the much better illumination you get, the result is quite gratifying.
If you go look at what a properly engineered LED illuminated magnifier from a decent name like Dazor costs (two of which I've owned in fluorescent versions... they really ARE 10x better than the Chinese cheapies), you'll feel MUCH better about the expenditure of time vs money.Alas, all mine are packed away in a trailer in BuffaloNY.
As for your project, my fear was mostly that recovering the odd bits you might have felt were no longer important, like the lens mounting hardware and such... would make the project no longer feasible. And depending on her mood, prizing the lens away from Amy could become a quest in its own right.
mnem