You might recall last month that I posted about my 3D-printed spectacles.
Enough people asked me for the files and for details on how to order lenses and mount them into the frames that I figured I’d release everything with instructions - and also redesign the hinges a bit so the temples fold more compact, something I meant to do for some time.
Hey, this is really cool! I’m trying to do exactly this but am making my own frames for the first time. Is there some forum where people discuss this? For tips and common pitfalls.
You talked about the registration tab at length. I’m making mine not entirely radially symmetric. Does this mean I don’t need them? Will the lens wabble inside because its PLA?
Does the frame slip more than with other material? Or maybe with a riding bow make it not noticeable.
Was the optician able to bend the temples with heat or was no frame adjustment needed at all?
You’ve made the lens groove in this triangle shape. Is that the standard or will the tracer edger pick up any shape tehre? How’d you decide how deep to make that groove?
How comfortable do you find wearing PLA so far?
Haha so many questions 🙂 Thank you for your interest in my little project.
To address you questions:
Is there some forum where people discuss this? For tips and common pitfalls.
There is not. Not to my knowledge anyway.
The few usetul forums I found are reserved for people who work in the eyewear trade and they don’t want you to participate. I tried joining by pretending to be a professional, but they either found me out by asking where my store was, or because I asked questions that no true professional would ask.
What I know, I picked up over the years (decades really) making my own frames. But the opticians don’t like it when you make your own frames, because selling you frames is their bread and butter. They make almost no money selling you lenses. So they won’t help you undercut their business, that’s for sure.
You talked about the registration tab at length. I’m making mine not entirely radially symmetric. Does this mean I don’t need them? Will the lens wabble inside because its PLA?
Your correction may or may not need orientation.
If you have a simple myopia or hyperopia correction, it doesn’t matter how your lenses are oriented.
If you have astigmatism however, your correction has an axis and the lenses need to be oriented correctly to within a couple of degrees. You can see if your correction has an axis in your prescription: it looks like an arrow with an angle.
Progressive lenses are also oriented, because near is at the bottom and far at the top.
With non-round lenses, that’s not a problem: the edging machine will measure your frames and cut the lenses so they’re oriented correctly when mounted in the frames. You can’t really mount them any other way.
With round lenses - or near-round - like mine, the lenses can turn in the frames and you need some way to prevent that. Round frames are really the worst possible choice if your correction is oriented. But hey, I like them 🙂
Traditionally, if the frames are made of metal, the hoops can be closed with screws, and tightening the screws clamp the lenses and prevent them from turning. With plastic frames, in which lenses are traditionally clipped - possibly after heating the frames a bit - the fit may be tight enough for the lenses to stay put on their own. If not, usually the optician will drop a drop of superglue at the edge.
Also, typically with round frames, the lens maker or the optician will make a very small, almost invisible mark on the lenses to find the correct orientation should the lenses move. If your glasses are round, look very carefully around the edge of the lenses and you should see the mark - usually next to something obvious like the hinges.
If your optician didn’t make a mark, they probably figured they’d measure your correction again to find the optical axis on each lens (they’ll draw 3 dots on each lens) and then they’ll line up the 6 dots. But it’s longer and more annoying than leaving a mark.
With my metal frames - which I made myself - the lenses are clamped hard in the hoops. No problem.
With my 3D-printed version, PLA is much too weak to take a thread to tighten the hoops around the lenses with screws (or take inserts) and printing hoops that lenses can clip into securely without opening them up is really fussy (I know, I did it for a friend’s glasses I reproduced out of PLA). And I sure as hell didn’t want to use superglue on my super-expensive lenses - not to mention, I want to be able mount them and remove them in minutes with no efforts.
That’s why I designed split hinges that close around the lenses when mounting the temples, and this registration tabs system to lock the lenses in place without applying pressure on them.
If your correction doesn’t need orientation or if you’re designing non-round frames, you totally DO NOT need the registration tabs. It’s only for round, oriented lenses.
Does the frame slip more than with other material? Or maybe with a riding bow make it not noticeable.
In my design, yes, because like I said, the lenses are held in the hoops with almost no pressure. without the tabs, they turn very easily.
If you design non-round lenses, they might “creak” a bit if you try to turn them forcibly and the frames don’t fit very tight around the edges. But they won’t slip.
If you’re designing clip-in frames and the fit is correct, they won’t move whatsoever. But you’ll need to print several versions of the frames with a few dimensions adjusted ±0.05mm here and there to find the right size to clip in the lenses with no major drama, yet with enough pressure for a proper fit. It’s really quite a lot of fuss.
Was the optician able to bend the temples with heat or was no frame adjustment needed at all?
I never go to the optician 🙂 I like being independent for things I need in my life (I’m also a partial foot amputee and I make a lot of my own shoewear for the same reason).
I used to adjust my 3D-printed frames a bit with a hot-air gun. It didn’t take long but I didn’t like the repeated trial and error process. So I took the time to work the adjustments in the FreeCAD models, as I explained on my Github, so the final frames fit my face perfectly without any adjustment, right out of the printer.
The only thing I do is polish the nose bridge with 600-grit sandpaper to smooth out the “staircase” a bit (layers of PLA deposited at a 45-degree angle) and then chemically-polish it even smoother with acetone. I also chemically-polish the inside of the ear hooks but only when I print them with certain PLA filaments I have that always end up a bit rough for some reason, if it’s a pair of glasses I intend to be wearing for many hours continuously, so the hooks don’t irritate my ears. But usually with most filaments, I don’t have to: the wires are very smooth naturally out of the printer.
You’ve made the lens groove in this triangle shape. Is that the standard or will the tracer edger pick up any shape there? How’d you decide how deep to make that groove?
There are many types of bevels. But that type seems to be the most common for “regular” prescriptions on fairly flat or slightly curved frames. Depending on how thick your lenses are at the edges, the bevel is placed more or less forward by the edging machine to hide as much of the thickness as possible at the front when the lenses are mounted in your frame.
Usually grooves for that type of bevel are called “hide-a-bevel” grooves or V-grooves in the literature. They nominally have a 120-degree profile from what I could read. Although in fairness, I measured a few old lenses I had lying around with a profile projector and they measured between 90 and 120 degrees. So if it’s a standard, it’s not a very well respected one.
There are other types of grooves. The frames I made for my friend for example didn’t have a groove at all: the groove was a 0.6mm square groove in the edge of the lenses themselves, and the bevel was inside the frame hoops. Very strange! I had never seen this kind before.
There are also chopped bevel profiles for ultra-thick lenses, and “shelf bevels” for wraparound lenses, etc… Look it up: there is an almost infinite number of bevel types. And that’s just for solid frames: if you frames have a wire at the botton of the lenses, then the top half of the lenses have a bevel and the lower half have a groove. The variety is bewildering.
Lens makers usually look at your frames and mount the grinding wheel(s) with the correct profile(s) in the machine - or if the machine is fully automated, the tool changer loads the correct grinding wheel(s).
Often, they don’t even need to look at the frames: if you chose a standard model at your local optician, more often than not, both the frames and the lenses are sold by the same supplier - and usually they’re in Vietnam or somewhere all the way around the globe, which is why eyeglasses take so damn long to make, in case you wondered 🙂 But I digress…
Anyway, one thing you can count on with almost absolute certainty is that all edging machines are capable of cutting a “hide-a-bevel” 120-degree bevel. That’s why I chose that “standard” for my frames.
As for the depth, you don’t really choose it: it depends simply on the width of the hoop. My hoops are 2-mm in width, which results in a ~0.5mm depth because of the angle. I indicate it in the picture on my Github for redundancy, just in case, but it’s not strictly needed: all the lens maker needs to know is that’s it’s a bog-standard 120-degree bevel, to load the correct grinding wheel into the machine, or something close enough to that profile.
How comfortable do you find wearing PLA so far?
The glasses are SUPER comfortable. It’s not really because it’s PLA or some other material: it’s because the fit is perfect for me. It’s like shoes or clothes: bespoke always feels better.
If you take the time to design your own frames to perfection - be it 3D-printed or made using traditional methods - when you hit the right dimensions, you’ll know immediately: they’ll be the most incredibly comfortable glasses you’ve ever worn. And when you do it yourself, you have all the time in the world to make the fit as perfect as you want it to be, something opticians don’t have time to do because, well, they have to make their time worthwhile.
Finally, my glasses weigh 14 grams all told. That’s VERY light and it goes a long way towards making them comfortable. That’s definitely a plus and it’s entirely due to the 3D-printing process.
I hope the above answers your question 🙂 I wish you good luck with your own design endeavor
Thanks for answering my questions.
The few usetul forums I found are reserved for people who work in the eyewear trade and they don’t want you to participate. I tried joining by pretending to be a professional, but they either found me out by asking where my store was, or because I asked questions that no true professional would ask.
Sounds like OptiBoard. This makes information so much harder to find! I’m glad you’ve put up stuff on GitHub and here.
I never go to the optician 🙂
I didn’t realize you worked with a lens maker directly and not through an optician. How did you even manage to do that? The labs I found via search engine needs info about whatever store I’m working for before even starting. I can’t even see the order form without, much less get price or products.
How do you get the measurement that the lens maker needs though? Like optical center and distance from pupil to lens. How did you pick the lens’ front surface (a “base curve”)?
How can you check if the lens you get back were made correctly? When something goes wrong and the optician fails to fix it, I can’t really tell what the problem is from just looking at the glasses.
If your correction doesn’t need orientation or if you’re designing non-round frames, you totally DO NOT need the registration tabs. It’s only for round, oriented lenses.
I do have cyl and axis from astigmatism but am currently making and tweaking some non-round lenses.
I’ve been putting trial lenses with no prescription in my frame to simulate the weight and when I slot those in, they don’t move at all. Its actually hard to pull the lens back out. So I’m surprised to read that superglue is sometimes used. Though I can see you don’t want errors to accumulate. I’d also want to avoid gluing them if I can.
If you design non-round lenses, they might “creak” a bit if you try to turn them forcibly and the frames don’t fit very tight around the edges. But they won’t slip.
Actually, I meant to ask whether the frames slip off your nose. That’s the problem I’m having right now. Without the simulated weight, they’re fine. But with weight, they slip off if I look down. I still have a lot of ideas of things to try to fix this but was wondering if someone else also ran into the same problem.
Finally, my glasses weigh 14 grams all told.
Very nice. If this works, I should also get lighter glasses. I actually wanted to experiment with different lens sizes. Though I think there isn’t an inexpensive way to do that.
Sounds like OptiBoard
The name rings a bell. Admittedly, I started looking into that stuff well before social media was even a thing 🙂
I didn’t realize you worked with a lens maker directly and not through an optician
Sorry I thought you meant to choose frames and for fitting. For that, I do my own, obviously.
But yeah, to order the lenses, I do have to go through opticians. And yes, they did measure my pupillary distance (only once, I’m not a shape-shifter), they do issue the order for the lenses in the correct format and they double-check the lenses when they arrive. Some of them tried to make me pay an extortion fee of $50 or something for bringing my own frames, but considering they wouldn’t be doing any added-value work beyond ordering the lenses for me, I thought that was a bit rich so I went elsewhere.
I did order lenses direct from Hoya once, because I had a friend who worked there. But apparently they found out and my friend told me never again, or he’d be in trouble. So now I go through my local optician when my prescription changes - which isn’t that often: the lady who owns the store knows me well, she’s kind of amused to see my various eyewear contraptions and she knows she’s never going to extract a fortune out of me, but also she doesn’t have to spend any time on me either. So she passes her supplier’s costs onto me almost without any surcharge.
I’m surprised to read that superglue is sometimes used
It’s only for round lenses, either in light-fitting frames, for safety in case the screw backs out in metal frames, or in plastic frames because plastic is a bit more slippery. Round lenses typically shift when you clean them with a little too much gusto and it can happen surprisingly easily even in well-fitting frames.
Glue is not ideal but sometimes it’s needed. And obviously it’s never used with non-round lenses that are always naturally oriented properly.
Without the simulated weight, they’re fine. But with weight, they slip off if I look down.
Firstly, are you sure those test lenses you’re using are polycarbonate? If they’re glass, they’re a lot heavier. And of course they might be thicker than necessary for your prescription because they’re cheap: thin lenses are lighter but more spendy.
But essentially you’ve discovered why I always wear glasses with cable temples 🙂 Yes, they’re a bit more annoying to fit in a case, but they hold your frames put on your nose and you never have to worry about your glasses slipping ever again.
Although the 3D-printed glasses I designed fold the temples at an angle to position the wires more smartly, so they fit in regular cases. And I’ve just finished designing a very nice 3D-printed custom case for them too, which I will publish on my Github soon. But here’s a sneak preview:
Also, I’ve been wearing cable temples for so long that the nose bridge of all my glasses, which all land more or less at the same place on my nose all the time, ended up leaving a permanent indent in my skin. So the nose bridge always fall in it now. I could almost do away with the temples and the frames wouldn’t even move at this point.
I think there isn’t an inexpensive way to do that.
If you don’t intend to change the shape of your frames, the easiest is to design around old lenses you have lying around. If you screw them up, you weren’t doing anything with them anyway so it doesn’t matter. And presumably they used to be as nice lenses as you could afford when you wore them, so they should be close to the new ones you’ll order after you’ve finished your design.
But yeah, to order the lenses, I do have to go through opticians.
That’s unfortunate. I’m trying to troubleshoot some problem that may be due to how the lens are made (or not). So having some understanding and control of that part of the process could have helped.
Firstly, are you sure those test lenses you’re using are polycarbonate?
Good question. I weighed my current frame + lens and printed frame + trial lens to pick trial lenses that match the weight. Like you, I’m execting to be lighter in the end but wanted to be on the safe side when tweaking the frames.
The trial lens are indeed glass but I’m using “plano” (0D) lenses because those match the weight. The actual lens is/will be plastic, but not polycarbonate. Its some material that’s only referred to by its index of refraction.
I’ll definitely add cable temples to the list of things to try and see what works well.
But here’s a sneak preview:
Nice! I haven’t even thought about the case yet. I was probably going to reuse an existing case but now this is giving me ideas :) Although at this point, I’m still mainly focused on solving the (medical) problem or at least gain some insight.
If you don’t intend to change the shape of your frames, the easiest is to design around old lenses you have lying around.
Indeed. Unfortunately, the main thing I want to do with 3d printing is to make frames with smaller lenses. They don’t make these other than for children and child-sized faces. So I don’t have any old glasses with lenses of that size.
So having some understanding and control of that part of the process could have helped.
The only things you can rely on with regard to how the lenses are edged is:
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The bevel will be “bevelly” - meaning it’ll be a bevel of some kind, between 90 and 120 degrees, but no flatter than that. In other words, you can rely on having something to grip the lens with and that’s enough.
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The bevel follows the curvature of the frame. If you frame is flat, the bevel will be placed all around the edge of the lens flat too.
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As much as your correction will allow, the bevel will be placed as far forward as possible so the lens looks like it’s tangent with the front of the frame all around, and all the thickness will be hidden at the back of the frame. So if your frame is, say, 2mm in width, the root of the bevel will be placed 1mm from the front of the edge.
The other thing you can rely on is that the bevel will be slightly oversized so they can be snapped into the frame, and the amount of oversize will be a bit higher for plastic frames which are more flexible. And that’s where the danger lies: if your frames are designed to hold the frame without pressure like mine, you have to tell the optician so they pass the information to the lens cutter. Otherwise you will received lenses that are slightly too big.
But don’t sweat it too much: the great thing with 3D printing is, even if the lenses you received aren’t the right size, you can always print another frame with slightly revised dimensions.
And if you really don’t want to print another frame, don’t forget that you pay beaucoup bucks for those damn bits of plastic, so you can always copiously warn the optician that your frames are not made of the kinds of plastics plastic frames are usually made of, and then the onus will be on the lens maker to make the lenses right for your frames (remember that they will be sent your frames, so they’ll know rightaway if the lenses fit).
If the lenses aren’t right, it’s their problem and you can reject the lenses and tell them to try again. If you warn the optician in no uncertain terms that your frames are PLA, they or the lens maker can’t claim they didn’t know.
Just design the frames you want with the shape you want, with a 120-degree bevel, and ask your optician if it’s workable for the lens maker. They might tell you they’ll ask them - and you can leave them a test print too if they want to sent it to the lens maker too. There isn’t much more to this really.
I’ll definitely add cable temples to the list of things to try and see what works well.
Be aware that cable temples are a lot more finicky to adjust than regular curved temples. If they’re too short, even a little, they’ll dig into the skin behind your ears and you’ll hate them. Likewise, if the hook is too narrow, the tip will hurt you under your ear.
That’s a big reason why cable temples went out of favor in the 1920’s: they’re great when they’re well adjusted, but they quickly become nasty and uncomfortable when they aren’t - unlike maladjusted curved temples which can simply ride up the ear a little without too much drama.
With regular metal wire, you can bend the temples this and that way to make them fit. Not so much with PLA. You can shape it with heat but if you do it more than once, it becomes rough and unpleasant to wear - if the PLA doesn’t delaminate completely. So take the time to design the right length and shape directly in your model. It’s a bit long and tedious but once you know the right dimensions, you’ll love how natural they feel.
Also, don’t make the wire too thin or it will dig into your skin as well. And too thick will make the wire inflexible and difficult to put on. The wire profile that works best for me is this (for PLA):
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Love seeing FreeCAD in use.
It’s awesome
It’s getting quite good, and considering what I paid for it, it’s very very good indeed 🙂
Yea I use it for all kinds of things. About to release some smart sensors with enclosures from it, last big thing was: https://nowsci.com/twystlock/
That’s so cool!
Cool!
Love the ghost in the shell profile pic :)
Great project! I would love to see them on someone. I fortunately don’t need glasses but I might at some point consider printing sunglasses.
Watch out. Luxotica going to place a hit on you.
how much do lenses cost like this?
It depends on your prescription, the material you choose, coatings and such. The shape of the lenses or the type of beveling have no impact on the price, unless they’re highly curved with a step bevel for instance.
My lenses are standard polycarbonate lenses with a basic scratch-resistant coating. But I have astigmatism and I need progressives, so the lenses come out at $400. And usually I also order a pair for far and near (not progressive) and they’re like $200 per.
That’s the only problem with the registration tabs in my design: it requires notching the bevel of the lenses - meaning you have to work up the courage to bring a file to brand-new lenses you just paid a sizeable portion of your last paycheck for 🙂
The lense cost is usually whatever your health insurance is willing to pay.
If it’s only $40, the lenses cost $40.
