Nick Leverton wrote:
SWMBO's reading specs have broken, the frame adjacent to the bridge
has fractured. Even in the event she gets round to ordering them
this week, it'll take at least a fortnight for new ones to arrive
from the Far East via an online optician (for strong prescriptions
it's hundreds cheaper than the local bricks-and-mortar optician
charges and a far better range).

As it's one of those metal framed specs which tensions the frame to
hold the lens in place, there isn't a hope that gaffer tape will work
:-)
In my experience, cyanoacrylate is too brittle and domestic epoxy too
weakly adhesive for the small contact area involved. But as I seem to
have simultaneously run out of epoxy (lost the resin tube),
cyanoacrylate (gone solid) and anything useful except grab
adhesive/filler, it's a great chance to try something new.

What would the team suggest that is cheap, readily available, useful
for other purposes too, and can hold the lens in place in the broken
frame for a couple of weeks against the flexing of a normally abused
pair of glasses ?

Thanks in hope

Nick

Nick,

I had a similar problem a couple of years back and tried all sorts of
glues - to no permanent success.

The frames I wear are the normal run-of-the-mill wire ones that surround the
glass and I managed to get an intermittent resolution by using Araldite
epoxy (the old-fashioned, long setting stuff rather than the quick-set) and
which I had to replace about every couple of days - until I got totally
fed-up and glued the glass and frame together. This lasted until my new
pair turned up from the opticians (with some rather unusually delicate
handling by me - and the intermittent use of an older pair of glasses with
far weaker lenses [I'm rather myopic]).

I have a very good relationship with my local opticians (not one of the well
advertised chains), and the technician there could not offer any temporary
solution for the problem - other than to buy a smaller, cheap frame and get
my existing lenses (glass varifocals) cut to suit -- with absolutely no
guarantee that the varifocal settings would be retained in the same place to
suit my retinal measurements.


Cash