Cheap reading glasses: great modeling aid

i used them too but for only a min at a time, when i take them off my eyes have to refocus and that sometimes will give a headache

i have a better solution now

i got one of those cheap desk lamps 6.99 the ones with the goose neck about 15 inches long  i took off the lamp part and put a hand held mag glass on it, best thing yet  you can look thru that all day with out eye problems because they are never as close to the eye as glasses so the eye does not have to adjust to it

After returning to the hobby after 25 years, I purchased a pair of 1.75 mag reading glasses to help.  I guess I was not aware of the problem with my eyesight until I started building again.  I now wear the glasses almost all of the time to read.  I guess I did not know what I was missing.

Reading glasses work great if both your eyes require the same correction.  Mine don't; my left eye is in considerably worse shape than my right, and I have trouble getting both of them to focus simultaneously on anything closer than about three feet.

For me, the solution turned out to be a pair of "flip-up" magnifiers.  They clip onto my regular glasses, llike flip-up sunglasses.  The regular glasses even out the difference between right and left eyes, and the magnifiers provide additional magnification.  Such gadgets can be bought through MicroMark (www.micromark.com) or Woodcraft (www.woodcraft.com).  The price is in the neighborhood of $15.00.

 

 

hkshooter wrote:

$15? I got mine for $3.99 at the hardware store. Like mentioned, they are great for brief moments of upclose work. Personally, I have 20/15 vision but it is getting harder for me to focus on things very close when I've been looking at things far away for a while. The reading glasses help me focus up REAL CLOSE which helps for those 1/72 scale instrument panels.

 

3.99?  I get mine for a buck at the dollar store. My over 40 eyes all of a sudden like the 2.0/2.5 magnification.

 

Cheers,

Max Bryant 

Well he knows more than the "average" one, I'd take his word on it. lol

$15? I got mine for $3.99 at the hardware store. Like mentioned, they are great for brief moments of upclose work. Personally, I have 20/15 vision but it is getting harder for me to focus on things very close when I've been looking at things far away for a while. The reading glasses help me focus up REAL CLOSE which helps for those 1/72 scale instrument panels.

Be aware that I don't "wear" these glasses, I use them for maybe 30 seconds at a time, perhaps a total of five minutes in an entire modeling session.  I pop them on to carefully apply canopy masking, say, or to paint a detail, then take them off.  In fact  I  have to take them off because they have a limited range of usefulness, and  everything past about  18 inches away blurs.

They literally are used like easily portable magnifying glasses, and I doubt they'll have the time to do the slightest thing to your permanant vision, good or bad.

Stephan

larryparamed wrote:

Well, I tend to disagree with your optometrist on that view. That would be like says don't use magnifying lenses and such as well, which is really all "reading glasses" are. They aren't a prescription vision correction lense, as such. I wear contacts to correct myopia ("near-sightedness") and a stygmatist in both eyes. My close up vision has always been excellent, even at 40 and corrected or not, but those reading glasses are handier to me than larger magnifyiers I really don't need.A strong desk lamp helps alot, to. Actually, I see you said "doctor". Well, he knows even less about it then imo lol so, yea....same opinion still. lol Go try them out you can return them if you want later.

That doctor is my chemo doctor.  Chemo has caused my eyesight to really get bad.  It changes from hour to hour and from day to day.  Now that it has been three weeks since my last treatment, my eyesight has started getting better.  I can almost read the clock on top of my TV. 

The reason he advised against them was my eyesight is so erratic that the glasses could cause harm to my vision.  His advice is to wait until four months and see what my vision will be like.  Then go see an eye doctor, and if I need glasses, I can get the proper type.  After that the cheap reading glasses will not cause any harm to my vision.  As it is now, it is a waiting game.

Well, I tend to disagree with your optometrist on that view. That would be like says don't use magnifying lenses and such as well, which is really all "reading glasses" are. They aren't a prescription vision correction lense, as such. I wear contacts to correct myopia ("near-sightedness") and a stygmatist in both eyes. My close up vision has always been excellent, even at 40 and corrected or not, but those reading glasses are handier to me than larger magnifyiers I really don't need.A strong desk lamp helps alot, to.

Actually, I see you said "doctor". Well, he knows even less about it then imo lol so, yea....same opinion still. lol Go try them out you can return them if you want later.

I was thinking about getting a pair to help with my model building.  My doctor told me "NO".  He said they could do more harm than good and to wait for my eyesight to stabalize and get them checked by an eye doctor.  If I need glasses then, they would be the correct prescription and could not cause any harm. 

I have a pair of the 3x. Makes me feel like a Gramps, but I'd rather feel old and see, than look young and squint! I perch them on my nose so I can just tilt my head for detail work.

Helps with the instructions, too!