Has anyone ever tried to take the PVS-7 lens out of their housing and compared it to the PVS-14 objective lens? By comparing photos online, it looks like the 7 has the same pitch and thread for the focus and even the same lock ring to hold them in the housing as the 14.

UPDATE: Got the PVS-7 lens in today and tried t out. First to keep the o-ring in the housing, I turned the stop ring on the objective lens the wrong way with the lip facing away from the image intensifier. Worked like a charm.

There's a park that's about 300m away from my house across an open field and the poles and lights there are a little blurry but can still see well enough for a bugout bag/loaner/beater NV optic.

I am still on the lookout for a good used PVS-14 objective lens.

With the WP tube and this particular housing, I seem to have lucked out and the houses and park at 300m ish are in focus.

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They're compatible in the sense that they fit. The PVS-7 lens is a tad longer than a PVS-14 lens and will stick out out some. Moving the infinity focus ring a bit forward makes up for the gap but leaves a couple threads visibly exposed on the PVS-14 housing. Cosmetic issues, really. Otherwise, it all fits and can be brought into focus without issues.

That's really interesting. Thanks for the information.

I wonder if that threading difference would effect water resistance or nitrogen purge loss

That is a good question. This almost makes me want to put together a loaner set for grins. I have 3 MX10160 tubes. Two are a matched set I am going to build a dual 14 set-up with those. The third one is that WP tube with the emission point. @TXDX is evaluating it now and if it is able to be fixed, I might just do that with a PVS-7 objective lens.

I've gotten alot of good advice from our experts in this forum and I have come to the conclusion a dual 14 set up will be more in line with what I need. I truly wish I had the money available for a dedicated bino rig.

I scrounged parts together and have put together two 14's already for right at $1k not including the two matched 10160 gen 2+ photonis tubes from @chosos. So less than $1k for each. Not too bad.

You might have different luck than I have with other lenses, but the range of focus on the PVS-7 objectives I've tried in a PVS-14 housing did not work 100% correctly. It it slightly out of focus at the distance/infinity settings. Will it work for testing? Yes. Is it something I would want to use? No, because images are blurry at distance due to using the wrong lens in the wrong housing. I wish it worked better, because I have an extra PVS-7 objective sitting in a PVS-14 housing right now. lol.

Also, yes, it will impact purge because the objective is able to unscrew beyond the o-ring.

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Great photo! This is the info I was looking for. Nowhere online other than Arfcom could anyone ever get such detailed answers. I was mainly wondering due to the fact that the objective lenses look exactly alike other than the bigger housing for the 7. I was looking at my 7 and noticed it had a retaining lock ring just like the 14. Plus my suspicion that the military is a bunch of cheap bastards. The 7 and 14 are used side by side in some units so I figured maintenance would want to be able to have the option of swapping lenses and I figured the contract companies that built both would want to have as much parts commonality for budget/contract price reasons. But that is just me overthinking everything.

I have heard others claim that you could get away with using the lens in the other housing, so maybe that is true of other pvs-14 lenses, but on the few I've tried - it has never worked. I also have good vision and notice very small differences between lenses, so the image being slightly out of focus might not bother others as much as it does me - it bothers me a whole lot.

Somewhere,

I have copies of the -maint manuals for the 7 and 14. I never read in there anywhere (although it would make sense) about the swappability under any conditions. Basically, if memory serves, if it fails testing dx the old one and get a new one.

Another thing on the applicability of parts swapping for kits, the 14 lens I got is blurry as hell no matter what I've done. I'm thinking it's counterfeit. Compared to the 7 which has astronomy telescope like razorness to it.

UPDATE: Got the PVS-7 lens in today and tried it out. First to keep the o-ring in the housing, I turned the stop ring on the objective lens the wrong way with the lip facing away from the image intensifier. Worked like a charm.

There's a park that's about 300m away from my house across an open field and the poles and lights there are a little blurry but can still see well enough for a bugout bag/loaner/beater NV optic.

I am still on the lookout for a good used PVS-14 objective lens.

Update in original post