I doubt that's what he's talking about.
Back in the mid 60s my job was to repair binoculars for the US Army for about two years. So I know quite a bit about these old military binoculars. At that time they were state of the art but the state of the art has moved on and left them behind.
The doublets were cemented with balsam back then. It breaks down readily and almost always the doublet lens in it will be separating and will need to be taken apart, cleaned and put back together. Unless you have a facility for grinding lens and recoating them this is almost an impossible task. Additionall the old coatings we used back then on them is rather soft as compared to today's coatings and they are usually scratched as are the lens some times. This requires as a minimum recoating the lens and often again either replacement or grinding.
It is relatively easy to disassemble these old binoculars and clean them but it is NOT so easy to collimate them once you've done it. That assumes only cleaning is required and that's in less than 1% of them. Unless you have a collimation fixture doing the job correctly is pretty much impossible. Can be done without it but only to a limited extent and not satisfactorily.
There are one or maybe a couple of places that still do this work for old binoculars bought as military surplus. I know I some times see an ad to do this in the back advertisements of magazines. Right at this time I do not have the name or contact info on anyone who does it. I don't know which magazines I've seen it in and so can't tell you for sure which to look in. But that's the place to find a source for doing this work. Look in the ads in the back of hunting magazines. Somewhere in there in one or more the ads can be found. Wish I could help more in pinning down who does it but I just don't know.
Now lets discuss another issue. Unless you just want these as a keep sake I'd not do it. Even when you get them reworked they will still be 40-50 year old technology. You'll pay far more to have them repaired than the price you'd pay for a pair with current technology that will be far superior to them. Even the lower priced ones in the $150-200 price range will be vastly superior to them and I doubt you'll get them professionally restored to the way the "USED" to be for that. My advice is if they are just a keep sake put them away for that and buy a new pair to actually use. That's what I've done with mine.
GB
