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Saturday, December 15, 2012

Making A Spectacle














I know this doesn't look like much right now.  But I assure you dearest readership I experienced a break through this morning on my friends glasses.  In the background is a bracelet I am putting together for a Christmas present.  There was a bit of sawing to do, and after I was finished with the bracelet pieces, and before putting my saw aside, I decided to jump back over on the spectacle project.
The original glasses are a friend of mine's glasses that he broke and tried to glue back together to no avail.  Neither he nor I have any disposable income to replace these, and he needs them to be legal as a driver.  I traced the two lenses onto a piece of cardboard, and then I glued the cardboard template down to a thrift store grey metal slide box.  Back in the day, photographers used these boxes to order their slides...before digital photography made most of this process obsolete.  I disassembled the slide box and cut out the pieces for the new glasses out of that grey metal.  I don't have any hinges, or glasses type hardware, nor any money to purchase these things, so I am trying to figure out ways to reassemble these glasses without the use of the usual hardware.  On the left side of the glasses you see the original tabs that I cut...just to see whether I could get away with holding the glass in with a series of over and under tabs.  It worked, but they are so long that they would interfere with the line of vision.  The right side is the shortened tabs that still successfully hold in the lens.  These are definitely a rough version of what they can be when I am finished with them.  I just needed to see if I could come up with an alternative way of holding in the glass that did not involve screws and tension as I don't have the equipment to do that, and his original glasses destroyed any of those pieces.  Now that I know the shorter tabs will work, I can remove the lens and cut them off to match the other side.  I am thinking about discarding the ear pieces altogether in favor of a headband that could become part of a ball cap and the glasses around the hat band until they need to come down for use.  I can finish the metal anyway I can think of, and the sky is the limit!  But it has to be functional before it is pretty.  So far this project has not cost me anything (except time) as I already had the grey file box left over from the metal quilt project.  These doomer glasses are just a prototype.  They are the sketch in a sense.  I can tell you this...I will never throw away an old pair of glasses again, as the new glasses out there for poor people are plastic, made in China pieces of shit!

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