How to Build Your Own PVS-14

hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground today we're going to be taking a look at how to make a pvs14 from a pvs14 parts kit so let's get started so why would someone want to build their own pvs1 14 or or other night vision device rather than just buy one outright the first reason is price uh really you can build your own pvs14 for vastly cheaper uh in a lot of cases than if you were to go to a company and buy one already pre-built now obviously when a company builds these you're going to get certifications and and all kinds of professional uh installation and stuff and such but as I'm getting ready to show you today these these things are not hard to build uh or technically assemble we're not actually building anything we're just assembling these right so uh from a parts kit and you get yourself a parts kit and you get yourself a tube put the put them together throw a battery in it and you're golden and that kind of rolls into the second reason which is availability uh right now in the Night Vision World uh everybody's buying it up uh the US government has a few massive contracts out there and really uh a lot of traditional night vision retailers are having a hard time keeping these in stock uh and if you do find one for some miraculous reason uh it's probably going to be have a substandard tube in it uh one that uh did not meet the military specifications or just didn't meet the the the contract so uh really you're going to be paying a lot of money for something that's not super great whereas if you were to build your own pvs14 from a part kit like this one uh you can shop around for a tube and buy a tube a lot easier sometimes than buying a fully assembled unit and finally another major reason that people might want to build their own pvs14 is privacy um granted you're going to have to deal with this whenever you go to buy your tube but for the most part A lot of people are aware of a lot of night vision companies out there requesting or making you give over a lot of private information just to buy one of these and we've talked about that a lot I know I have talked about that a lot uh over the years in our other content but honestly this is something that I just keep coming back to because it it just bothers me so much uh companies that go above and beyond to follow rules that don't exist um so when a company makes me sign over a stack of paperwork that acknowledging that for you know me acknowledging that I'm going to follow itar and then makes me give over scans of my government IDs which is not required by law or by their contract with either L3 Harris or some other company like that that's not cool and um I don't like that so I prefer to build my own pvs1 14s because there are a lot more companies out there that sell tubes as opposed to the final product so I'm able to get the the parts kit that I want and I'm able to put the tube in it that I want and I'm able to do that and keep a little bit of my privacy so I prefer to go that route and as we can see here in just a minute this is extremely easy to do so let's Jump Right In into it and let's start building this thing all right so let's get to it so the first thing that we need to do is clear our workspace and Dawn our PPE we want to make sure absolutely sure that we don't get any finger oils or any dust inside the device or if it if we do get dust in there we can remove it pretty quickly um it's okay to be overly paranoid with these uh when it comes to dust I have found that for me personally I don't mind blemishes in a night vision tube uh because it's just something you have to expect but I really don't like dust because that's something that is absolutely preventable uh so what I tend to do is go a little bit overboard and I'll open up a brand new one of these uh just a generic uh lens cloth and use that as a workspace to put my tube and even now I won't even put it down on on its glass base because I'm I'm paranoid that the static electricity generated by picking it up will I pick up dust so I tend to like put on its side there and hope it doesn't roll away uh so this is your night vision tube this right here is the heart of all night vision devices and what you're paying for so I'm going to go ahead and put the night vision tube aside for a moment I'm going to go ahead and kind of wrap it up a little bit just to make sure that any dust doesn't kind of become attracted to it and we're going to start breaking apart our parts kit all right so the first thing we can do to disassemble this bad boy and put the tube in it is to remove the large rear lens these threads are really fine so it takes a lot of uh screwing to get it undone okay there we go so as you can see is as you get this it will come with a couple of uh pins that are not connected to anything uh and those will handle right now so let's set the large rear objective lens off to the side and let's go ahead and start unscrewing the housing using our 564 hex bit all right so once you get your screws undone the halves of the battery compartment and the rest of the housing will come apart very easily just like that so uh what we can do here is plug in our gain control so again like I mentioned these will usually come loose when in a parts kit um if you're getting a refur a refurbed uh device or parts kit you might have them attached who knows so that's why you need to be gentle but really we're just going to line these up just just the way the battery housing has them here and we're just going to simply push them down onto their little leads right there one and let's see if I can get the second one in there without causing any trouble sometimes this one gives me a little trouble so let me come at it from this angle there we go so now we have our our leads plugged in very easily now you can go ahead and close this all up if you wish being very careful to make sure that you do not pinch this ribbon cable here uh you can push this all all the way back together like so but what I prefer to do is leave it open so that we could slide our tube in more more easily so let's go ahead and grab that now what I like to do is make sure that we have all of the dust out of the out of the main housing here and to do that I like to take this little uh photography lens puffer thingy and jetting air up into the cavity like this I try to make sure that the device is facing down so that I'm blowing air and hopefully the dust will joggle loose and fall out of the device that's kind of the goal here um because I I don't know if that works any better than just doing it like this but I don't know maybe maybe there's some thought to that who knows so all right we're going to make sure that we have all the dust out of there and the other half as well why not all right so taking our tube here this particular style of tube does not have the little pigtail for gain control because this is an autogated tube so really what we're looking for is this little Notch right right here and this little line which kind of helps us align it while we're going to slide it right into the housing just like so very gently until it lines up with that little toggle right there it's a little easier to show on camera if we leave the side open normally I I don't even insert the tube at this point I normally close this back and then work from this end uh because I think it's a little easier and there's a little bit less of a chance of breaking this ribbon cable um so that's what I'll do and I will close this back up and put a couple of screws in it to hold it all right so now that we've gotten the battery compartment screw back on we can actually finish uh finish up here with the tube uh we just got to make sure that we are in fact down in that Groove and you can see here the the threading has a little Gap there in it which aligns with a notch in the actual tube itself so that's good we're all good to go we're down as far as you can go as you can see there are several layers of uh threading so that you you know that your tube is is as far down as it can go uh inside the housing here next up we take our handy dandy light pipe here which is that little plastic piece that came with your parts kit and we throw it in there this is what shows you your battery indication on most devices as well as your um infrared Illuminator if you have it um and we want to make sure that we have this oriented the correct way so the designers of this $10 piece of plastic uh put in there handy for us a nice little uh I don't know if you can see it or not but it says right here says the word up and obviously if you can read it then it's the right way up if it's if it's upside down you can tell it's upside down so the upside will be up and you can actually go over here and see this little Notch right here which aligns with the notch in there so let's go ahead and drop it in these little things are a little finicky so his handed you have a little screwdriver to kind of Co it down into the right spot making sure to not touch or scratch anything and there we go it's now seated in the notch very very nicely and finally the retaining ring so uh this is what holds it all together make sure your tube doesn't rattle around and keeps your light pipe every and everything all straight uh this is one of the ways you can actually damage your device uh if you end up cross threading this this is very easy to cross thread and you do not want that because you ruin the threads inside your housing so uh this little ring here maybe what 15 bucks to replace but your housing costs a lot more than that so again just drop it in there being being very careful again again if you have a tool you can make it a lot easier on yourself but uh a lot of times we don't have the tools we need to to do the job so we have to improvise and that's okay so let's go ahead and get this in the right spot and make sure that we're not cross threading anything using our our Precision screwdriver here to get it as far down as it'll go you can even back it up when I'm usually if I'm working on something and I'm scared that I'm going to cross thread something I will take the the thing I'm trying to screw in and and reverse it till I can see it click uh into place up against the threads uh and that will help get it going so once we get it started it's a lot easier we can just continue on around uh now again you can improvise a tool out of this that's also good to do you can take a credit card and cut it down to to be the right size and uh hopefully I'm showing this on camera well we can just being very careful making sure that we're tightening it down not overtightening and there we go uh this it's pretty sow snug in there so I don't want to tighten it anymore I don't want to overtighten things and that's perfectly fine so now all we have to do is thread on our lens threading on our lens again making sure to be very careful with these very fine threads again what I'll do sometimes is thread it backwards until I can hear a click just like that now I know the threads are set and I can slowly move forward without using any Force whatsoever um it's going to be a little tough because there's an O-ring you're trying to get fast uh or or actually engage but uh once you get it going you'll feel that it's going in the right way and you can tighten it all the way down again this is where a tool might be helpful for this but again you don't really need that you can just crank it down pretty good at this stage you're not going to break anything these things are pretty uh pretty durable or at least a lot more durable than people think and that's usually good enough for government workers right all right so once you get your lens screwed back on you're done uh you could slap a battery in this and you're good to go now there is one final step that I wanted to talk about briefly because not many people mention it and uh it's a little bit controversial so one of the main benefits to having a pre-built night vision device uh made by a company that can actually do it and not just this you know amateur assembly here uh is the ability to nitrogen Purge the reason the nitrogen purging is somewhat controversial is is because like anything in this sort of tactical Community there's some there are dieh hard supporters and people who say that it's probably not necessary now my own opinion and my own experience is that yes nitrogen purging is superior it would be preferred if you could do it but again the the hardware required to purge this pvs14 you if you were to buy that you could buy another pvs14 it's that expensive so since we don't have expensive vacuum pumps and nitrogen purging adap rors and tanks of nitrogen sitting around we have an alternative solution so our solution is somewhat in between the options of getting a professional agency to uh Purge your device and not doing anything at all and that third option is kind of a bootle option which involves uh kind of a pseudo Purge and using uh wine preserver now a lot of people will just use canned air to do this and I don't like that because it's not truly an inert gas um it really isn't uh that great of an option this is a far better solution um and hopefully in explaining how this works I can explain why this might work a little bit better so really what you need to do is get the air out of the device and that's not really going to be possible un because the way to do this the way that professionals do this I should say is by removing this screw right here which we can do there we go remove that screw and that's now creates a a cavity to the inside of the device what they'll do is they will suck all of the air out of that creating a vacuum inside this and then let the nitrogen gas flow into that and they'll do that several times and that will fill the device with nitrogen cover your uh cover the hole back up uh screw the screw back in and you're good to go your device is now full of nitrogen with uh no air inside it whatsoever well here's the deal normal air whatso normal like air that you breathe is 70% nitrogen anyway so you're just replacing 70% nitrogen air with 100% nitrogen air which again makes a difference again professional purging is obviously uh preferable uh to not doing anything at all however it's not as big of a difference as you might think so again our pseudo our pseudo um purging method is to take a can of this wine preserver now it's very important to get the right kind of wine preserver because this is usually used uh for people to uh squirt this gas into their wine bottles to displace the air again same way and pre and allegedly prevent the wine from going stale or whatever well here's the deal uh this can is actually full of 100% Argon gas at least based on my research this particular brand is pretty much pure argon so uh it's not like you your canned air that you get for like dusting off keyboards and stuff uh this is actually pure Argon gas which is a noble gas again which is uh essentially in the same vein as nitrogen so what we're going to do is we're going to take this can we're going to take the little uh applicator nozzle here and we're going to hopefully uh squirt enough argon into this uh device to displace the air so that the normal breathing air comes out of the device and the Argon goes in we're going to be careful extremely careful to keep the can oriented upright uh so that we don't get any moisture in there and we don't want to drive any moisture into into the actual body of the night vision device so again I'm not creating a perfect seal otherwise I'm just going to pressurize the can I am using probably way more than I need to but I want to make absolutely certain because this can is a little pricey for what you're using it for but again it might be worth it because we're going to make sure that we get as much argon in there as we possibly can there we go all right that should be enough put the can away get our finger over it now technically you don't even need to do that because argon is heavier than air so if you have this oriented this way you have no problem whatsoever so I can just drop the screw right in screw it in so we screw in the screw and there we go we are done now our device is fully well pseudo purged I should say and uh we should have at least be a little bit more uh resistant to things like fogging but again not strictly necessary if you live in a tempered environment I just find that on all of my Optics from uh you know weapon sites to binoculars to rangefinders they all kind of have the same problem where I live so uh I tend to do this just because it helps a lot so there you go your very own pvs14 that you can assemble your yourself at home with minimal tools uh and able to take advantage of any parts you might be able to scr online thanks everybody for watching and we will see you next time and as always fight in the shade