Okay my new AGM nvg-50 showed up today, here is a pic thread of how to load tubes in to it. There are two pods as it is a bino, both sides are the same.

edit
I figured out the IP stop adjustment, and it is a little confusing at first.

The screw on the left side you turn counter clockwise to let the pod go closer to the right pod. The one on the right is the opposite clock wise will move it closer to the left.

Tools needed:
allen keys, not sure of what size it was, but its the same as what a pvs-14 uses to hold on the battery housing.
a tool for the lock ring, I used the old credit card cut to fit tool.
can of computer duster

thats it

Okay first remove the 4 small allen screws holding the housing to the bridge. You can see 2 in the pic below, the other two are hiding behind the bridge, just rotate the pod to see get to them.



Next Unscrew the eye piece, there is spanner holes. I dont have the right size spanner, so I just unscrewed it by hand. Here is the empty housing showing the light pipe and lock ring.



Remove the lock ring and light pipe, the pic shows the angle of the light pipe vs the housing. The light pipe has a "bump" that fits into a area that they removed the threads, that is the location means.



Next slide the tube in, feeding the pigtail in first.



The tube locating pin is just a small tab of plastic, it matched the notch in the tube.



Once slide in all the way and aligned, install the light pipe.



Then the lock ring. Tighten it snugly, but dont Hulk it.



Screw the eye piece back in place, but first a squirt of computer duster to get rid of any dust.

The next part is the hardest part of the hole job, and that is getting the pigtail into place. I found holding like the pics below was the easiest way, unless you have a helper.





Then gently line it back up, honestly the angle of the plug, to the tube it kind of falls in nicely. Just dont bend it too sharp or pinch it.

Reinstall the allen screws, wash rinse repeat the other side. Install the battery and give it a test.

Okay my notes.

One thing I kind of like is the objective is held on with 3 philips screws, if you so felt like it you could pull the objective to give it a blast of computer duster if it gets dust in it. Just be careful there is an oring that sits in the housing that falls out to seal the objective on. make sure it goes back in properly. If it does not it will screw up the angle of the objective lens.

Lastly, this goes together very easily, if I where to do another, I could do it in less than 5 mins per pod. That does not mean rush, take your time, its just pretty easy and fast after you do a couple.

I will test it tonight. I have a great environment for test and comparing tubes and lenses. There is a house about 100 yards away from mine thru the woods, I can see the mullions in their windows thru both my pvs-7 and pvs-14s with onmi 7 tubes in each. It is not like I can see them perfectly they kind of loose parts due to limit of the resolution, but I can see 90% it. So I have a perfect resolution test to see if the 50 degree lens looses something, and I have a base line.

Edit: Review time
Conditions over cast with the moon coming up, Pretty much completely under the trees, tree cover filling in.

First resolution. Using the neighbors window mullions a 100 yards away there is some loss in resolution, not much. Using my pvs7 as a benchmark tonight, it was the same can see 90% of the mullions with the pvs7, with the agm 50 it dropped to probably 80 to 85 %. I could see that is was less visible, but not that much, just enough to tell. All tubes omni 7, the tube in the agm are older, the one in the -7 has about 10 hours on it now.

Second field of view. Using 2 trees about 30 to 35 feet away thru the -7 I could not see both out side edges of the trees. One tree is about 20 inches across, the other is about a foot. With the agm 50 I could see the out side edges plus a bunch. When I aligned one edge of the view with where the -7 was the field of view was a good 3 to 4 feet wider.

Over all image, the -7 is a cleaner view, I think some of that is the tube. Strange part there is more noise, under most lighting conditions, but when I turn the gain down ( I like it down ) it is not enough to complain about. When I crank the gain the noise is much more obvious. Is it obnoxious, no, but I ca see it.

edge distortion, there maybe some but I dont really see it as a a problem. I really needed to look for it to see any.

Side light artifacts, yes they are there but they are not annoying in my tests looking for it.

Over all I do like them, for the price I paid they are worth it. Are they worth 1500 probably not, the lower weight than  bridged -14 I did notice immediately. The wider view is nice, but now that I have seen it I could live with out it.

Will I keep them, I dont know, esp sense kosher surplus just raised the price 350 bucks

I would spray out the area between the ocular lens  and the intensifier as you are sliding the tube in for the first time.

The two main areas I focused on were:

- inside ocular and corresponding side of tube.
- inside eyepiece and corresponding side of tube

I did this two days ago and 95% of my “peppering” disappeared.

You are the man OP! I'll be doing this soon and this will be a huge help

Very nice! Will be doing this soon as well.

Great post

I scanned, not in detail, but your next step is read the DIY Collimation thread and perfect that puppy.

Good on 'ya, OP!

AS I figure out other items, I am going to update the original post, but right it here too. So if this ever found by someone looking for info they will not need to scan the whole thread.

I figured out the IP stop adjustment, and it is a little confusing at first.

The screw on the left side you turn counter clockwise to let the pod go closer to the right pod. The one on the right is the opposite clock wise will move it closer to the left.

I could not figure out why the one side did not seem to work, now I see why, I stupid.

The little known secret that everyone tries to hide: how easy it is to assemble night vision stuff

Nice work, looks pretty cool.

I can hear the keyboards clicking, lol

Nice! Is your IPD a little mushy or do the pods hit a hard stop? Mine are definitely a bit soft, even when the adjustment screws are all the way in/out.

I would not call is mushy, I would call it firm with some flex. I think the way they work is a flat spot on the shaft and the stop hits the flat spot at an angle, the further in the sooner it hit the shaft. Between the shaft flexing and the stop flexing it adds up to more flex.

on both sets of my AGM's the IP's have a hard stop when you articulate the goggles.

It is a hard stop but not like hitting a brick wall.

update bottom of OP with in use review

Assembly is the easy part, setting all the stops and collimating are the hard/impossible part (with basic hand tools most have) is the hard part.

Wow, they did raise the price $350.... WTF! Lol

Yup they did raise the price, I wonder if they where following it here and figured there maybe a run on them at 999.

Btw they work great for driving, I went around and did a little driving last night. For driving the 50 degree FOV is great, I felt perfectly safe at about 30 mph. Now I live on a tree covered barely used road, and have a 400 acre county park across the street so I a great place for driving under NVG

I was in at a grand and planned on getting one next week. For $1350 it’s not worth it.

Dang.  I was just thinking about selling a few things to get these.  Not sure i want to at 1350

Agreed

Mine are Hard stops. Not mushy at all.

I saw that Kosher just raised the price. His supplier raised his. If you decide to move the unit I would be interested closer to the  original price.

The only draw to these was the low price, I wonder if the sudden spike in popularity caused them to increase the cost. Frankly, at the new price, they're just not worth it anymore. You're only $600 or so short of an RNVG or MOD3 with mil-spec optics at that point.

+100%.

Especially for the DIY builder who might already have two -14's with optics and all.

That's literally 100% of RNVGs I build for dudes. Taking two 14s, clipping them, and putting the glass and tubes into the provided RNVG housings and sending them back the unit with all the spare parts.

The other nice thing about that is most guys are able to recoup about $600 just selling the upper and lower housings on Tacswap or the EE. When you consider that route, you're looking at only about $700 for the RNVG housing after recouping the cost from selling off the PVS-14 parts.

Just curious, how many times have you had two -14's that were incompatible/unusable (horrible divergence, specs, etc.)?

Not many, but of course that's totally subjective. But I also make sure to get detailed information on the tubes the customer wants to send before I recommend taking that route. If you have two Omni VI-VIII ITT tubes, you'll probably be okay as far as usability goes, you'll just be rolling the dice on how close the specs are (usually they're not even close). Keeping in mind that the reason why guys tend to take the modification route is the significant cost savings over just starting over with a new system, so if they aren't a perfect match, most guys understand and are ok with that.

There have been times when I've had some tubes that were waaaay off as far as divergence to the point where they would never pass a collimation test, but those all tended to be Harris (Pre-L3Harris), and I chalk that up to QC issues at Roanoke. Sometimes shimming can help, but usually not, and I typically can tell before even assembling if there might be a collimation issue: if it has an Everest power supply, it's going to be a challenge. Pre-Harris ITT or Exelis tubes never seem to have a problem, and L3s have always been pretty much dead on, since as I understand, they don't allow an increase in divergence between their 11769 and 10160 modules. Maybe @NVGdude can add some clarification to that, but that's my understanding, and it checks out since I don't even have to collimate those most times aside from very fine tuning.

In my experience, there are absolutely no Omni IV tubes that will work, and Omni V are hit or miss, due to significant mid-production changes that occurred during that time. Surprisingly, Photonis tubes are extremely consistent as far as divergence goes and they collimate very well.

Good info.

That’s my experience with filmless 11769’s. When I switch them between -14’s and binos I don’t need to mess with the eyepieces much.

That makes a strong case for going with -14’s with L3H 11769’s as duals. Makes your job a lot easier, lol. Do you still put resistors on those or just unplug them?

Modern L3 tubes I just remove the plug and return them to the customer so they can reinstall them if they desire later on. No resistor required.

Photonis, you just snip it off. No resistor. In fact, Photonis supposedly will still honor the warranty if you cut the tail from what I've been told.

The only tubes that need resistors are the ITT/Exelis Pinnacle and the Harris Everest tubes. Oh, and the Elbits, but those are the same as the Harris Everest.

ETA: I don't think I would recommend buying L3 PVS-14s specifically with the intention of later putting them in a bino.

GREAT info. Especially about the Photonis tubes

Take the photonis bit with a grain of salt though. I'm not sure if it applies across their entire product line, and I'm not sure what all tubes, across what date ranges it applies to.

10-4

Same here. Was going to convert to 14s in the KAC bridge. Not sure I’m in for 1350 though.

Hey everybody, so got a set of these and put some omni VII mx-11769's in them... everything went smoothly and they function fine. I just for the life of me cant figure out how to set the infinite focus, i have the objective lock ring loosened and tried playing with that and the objective focus but the furthest its focusing at max is about three feet away.

How did you guys set the focus and collimate these?

I had no issues with the focus, I would think your on the right path with the lock ring.

collimation is done by unscrew the 3 little screws on the front mount and rotating the lens mount 120 degrees, test and do it again. Each lens has 3 possible positions, so only 9 total options.

I have played with rotating the objective lenses to try to get more focus out of it still no luck, took everything apart and the tube is fully seated and everything looks fine. I'm starting to wonder if I have a defective unit.

also now the binos are stuck in the fully articulated position, I don't want to force it and end up breaking them but now im stuck literally and figuratively

Not sure if I should try calling koshersurplus, agm, or just find a builder. These aren't very complex units so idk what's going on.

Pull the tubes and exchange it

Doing that, Koshersurplus is working with AGM to get me taken care of

You are the 5th person I have heard of running into this issue. When you pull the pod off, there is an adjustment screw for a spring/ball detent that you need to knock loose for these to articulate again. Then you need to reinstall it, but adjust it properly so it does not lock upon articulation. Mine had the same problem and once adjusted, it is a non-issue.

Yup, I just got a unit back that I sold with the same issue. I took it apart and generously greased the ball bearing and then adjusted it so that it barely even engages. It's probably better to not even have it in there.

The reason I nuked my own post about these was because, despite trying to be objective about the pros and cons, it was giving these way too much positive attention. In having spent more time with them, I am convinced they're not worth anyone's money.

My honest statements

Yes the flair, in the right situations is pretty sever, luckily i am very rural so I dont have really any stray light sources causing an issue. I could see someone running these in an urban area getting annoyed.

The lens does cause more noise on my tubes, but not enough to make me run away from em. I like my gain down lower so its not an issue.

the build quality seems okay, no real issues on my end.

The 50 degree lens, I said early on in the thread after seeing it i could live with out it. Well after I have driven with em, walked in the woods with em. I like the 50 degree, its more nautral. Could I live with out it, yes would I want to not really.

I think for the 1k price they are fine, and maybe a good step into binos for a decent price. The cost at 1300 or what ever they are now, I would say save a little more.

Will I upgrade, maybe if something better come out close in price yes, or if I find a deal then yes. I was quoted 2800 to make my 2 -14s in to mod 3 set up. I am glad I did not do it, as I can see myself never splitting it apart. I also want gain. If I could find the bvnd google cheap maybe go that way, the carson looks ok, not sure if it has gain. I will not have binos will out gain.