After the eye test last week I nipped down to Fairplay Optical in Old's
Close, Watford today. They've done all my spectacle repairs for over 20
years, putting new nylon wire in the frameless ones a couple of times,
soldering a broken nosepiece back onto a metal frame once, fitting new
plastic ear covers and changing the lenses when required after eye tests.
Always for pennies and always while I waited. I think the last job was to
replace a broken nylon wire and both ear plastics because one had started to
crack. Took one of the guys about 20 minutes and cost me three quid which
frankly was crazy and no way for anyone to make a living. A tenner would
have been cheap enough. An optician would have charged two or three times
more still.

The specs that finally broke a while back cost me an almighty £200 from the
village optician 23 years ago which must be £300 plus in today's money. The
nosepiece that snapped off was on that pair and not that many years after I
bought them as I recall. The soldered repair was still solid and much
stronger than the OE job when the other nosepiece finally gave up the ghost
a while back and also snapped off and I decided to get new specs because
that pair was so out of date.

Anyway I chose two cheap pairs of specs at £15 and £25 and they didn't even
want any extra for posting them out to me because all the lense grinding
machines were set up for long runs and they couldn't do them until tomorrow.
Not bad at two pairs of specs for £40 all in and they should be here on
Wednesday.

They've also got their own website now at http://www.glassesonspec.co.uk/ so
you can buy online or use the contacts page to reach them. Highly
recommended.

It's actually worth a trip down just to see how the lense grinding machines
work while you wait for your specs to be made or repaired. When I first
started using them they were a one man and a dog operation with a single
lense grinding machine. Now thay have 5 or 6 CNC controlled machines and
several employees and do the lenses for all the opticians in the local area.
It's just if you go to an optician you pay several times as much for the
high street shop rental and the consequent huge markup.
--
Dave Baker