Subject: Safety spectacles, why so difficult?
From:
Date: 21/07/03 14:25 GMT Daylight Time
Message-id:

I just phoned the optician where I last went for glasses and asked
about some 'safety spectacles' made up to the same prescription as my
current (reading) glasses for use when D-I-Y'ing.

They didn't have much idea what I was on about really! It seems strange
to me in our safety conscious society that something like this is hard
to find.

I'm *much* more likely to wear prescription safety glasses than
goggles or similar eye protection. I realise that safety spectacles
aren't as good as the best goggles etc. but they are still going to be
much better than the likely alternative.

Presumably most safety spectacles are paid for by businesses or other
workplaces and thus 'ordinary' opticians don't get to know much about
them.

Go to www.yell.com and look up optical goods wholesalers. These are the people
who opticians send your specs to to get the lenses made. Many years ago in the
days before MS Windows I used to have a friend whose business unit was next
door to one of these places. I popped in one day to see if they could mend the
broken bit of "fishing line" that held my lenses in. Everyone was wandering
around rather grumpily for some reason and the boss asked me if I happened to
know anything about computers. Turns out the pc that drove their lense grinder
had run out of disk space and refused to play ball but there were no unusually
big files on the disk that could be filling it up. So I had a look with chkdsk
and the disk was full of dummy FILExxxxx.chk files (for anyone old enough to
remember Dos).

I'd come across this before with CAD applications. If you switch the pc off at
the mains without shutting it down properly first any temp files the programme
has created stay on disk as dummy files. I asked them how they switched theirs
off and sure enough they just unplugged it rather than closing the application
down properly. With many megabytes of dummy files deleted it all worked again
and the guy said I'd saved them a small fortune on getting the pc support bloke
out. On the strength of that I got my fishing line replaced and free lenses
whenever I wanted them so I used to just find the cheapest optician to do the
test and take the prescription into them for making up and fitting.

As for the lenses, they cost about a quid and come as huge round blanks big
enough for any frame and in all the various strengths. The CNC machine
digitises your frame shape and then grinds the lenses down to fit. Takes a few
minutes each and costs very little. Then the optician marks the price up by
several hundred percent for doing little more than putting your frames in the
post. The place I used is in Watford

Fairplay Optical Ltd
Unit 7, Olds Close
Watford Hertfordshire
WD18 9RU

Tel: 01923 777618

I'm sure they or anyone else local to you would be as happy to make your lenses
up as work for opticians for peanuts.


Dave Baker - Puma Race Engines (www.pumaracing.co.uk)
"How's life Norm?"
"Not for the squeamish, Coach" (Cheers, 1982)