3DPrinting

Hermione: No Harry, like this

🪄 Reprapario

Or, if you want new ones

🪄 Cuono Deponefacio Exemplum

there is a company that makes resin printed children’s glasses for about €200 a pop

Commercial, high-quality 3D-printed glasses are sold everywhere here in town - including for adults. And they look pretty good too. But I'm more interested in making stuff myself - and for pennies too. What's the fun in buying ready-made? 🙂

Well I could do a lot of things, but one of my hobbies is to model stuff that prints out all ready to go as much as possible. This design uses small metal hinge pins only because printed-in-place functional hinges would be huge.

But otherwise I like that it's only 3 parts that print quick, don't require any rework, and still open up to accept the lenses, orient the lenses (I have astigmatism so my lenses need to be rotated exactly right, and if you look carefully on the inside of the hinge, the V groove is interrupted to match a notch in the lens' bevel, which also contributes to lock the rim closed) and everything holds together smartly with only those two pins.

So yeah, I could do extra work to make them look nicer, but I'm kind of proud to display how I managed to make them look straight out of the printer.

Not to mention, I'm lazy too 🙂

When you smooth you do give up some dimensional accuracy.

These days, I more or less exclusively print ASA and PETG. I would call the ASA tougher than PETG, but PETG's ability to stick to itself when printing makes me prefer it for thin parts. In my experience, PETG also allows for more elastic (temporary/recoverable) deformation before the part undergoes plastic (permanent) deformation.

You can smooth PETG with Methylene Chloride, but I would not suggest handling things without proper training and knowledge first

I see what you did there.

Thanks! 😊

I'm not OP but if you look close to the outer edges of the frame where they meet at the hinge you can see that the front frame is not "sealed" and lenses can be inserted this way and then fixed with the hinge pin. That's my guess.

No, the rims have a standard hide-a-bevel groove all around, and the hinges are split. You can see it in the 3D model. The lens is inserted into the groove and the hinge is closed by mounting the temple part of the hinge.

FreeCAD

I haven’t worn circular specs since college (~1990)

I haven't worn anything but small round glasses since I discovered why they're just better: small and round lenses can be positioned very close to the eyes, which provides a very large field of vision. And they're less fragile and prone to breaking if you hit your head on something or snag the end pieces on clothing.

And of course, frames are easier to make. I haven't bought frames in 30 years. I make my own.

Just a thought but you might like to investigate using spring steel for the arms and PLA just for the frames.

Nah. Those PLA glasses are in fact a copy of a frames I made of silver nicket - and wound spring steel wires for the ear hooks - and having worn them all day for 3 days now, I actually enjoy the feel of PLA better. And it's so much lighter! It really does make a difference.

And of course, if I break them, I can print another set of temples in minutes. If I don't like the feel, I can lengthen them or shorten them in FreeCAD and again, within minutes, I have new ones. No more faffing around with the heat gun or anything.

I really dig the disposableness of it all 🙂

Would you mind sharing/posting an STL/3MF for these?

Sure why not:

https://github.com/Giraut/3D-printed_eyeglasses

Also, is that Galaxy Black filament?

The filament was generic PLA - or perhaps Prusament PLA, which is generic PLA with a fancy name from Prusa, I'm not sure what spool was loaded.

Not very many. Those lenses were mounted in silver nickel frames I made myself too, so the ergonomics had been sorted out a long time ago. I simply copied the geometry of my metal frames.

I think I corrected the front of the frames twice - once to lower the greater diameter by 0.5mm because the bevel isn't completely identlcal to my metal frames' and once because the Prusa Mk4 didn't print the nose bridge right, so I added that horizontal bar as a support. And I lenghtened the temples by 5 mm, is all.