troubleshooting tips

Hand Tools We

Karlen McLean, ABOC, NCLC

Aside from their most obvious use, there are many “off-label” applications for hand tools as well.

Q What are your most useful optical hand tools and why?

A These answers may surprise you and help you troubleshoot jobs in innovative ways.

1. Mounting pliers: Can be used to clean swarf from grooved lenses and adjusting liners, as well as tucking in liner ends.
2. Padded pliers: Have many uses such as aligning temples or bent barrels and straightening eyewires or pad arms.
3. Base curve pliers: For adding base curve to eyewires for proper lens fit, and unrolling and reshaping damaged eye wires.
4. Flush cutters: Good for bolt cutting, nylor frame line and liner, and temple amputations.
5. Sizing pliers: For hard-to-reach barrels to assure proper lens fit.
6. Taps: Those that correspond to tap and snap bolt sizes help avoid binding and breaking when resizing a threaded barrel.
7. PD ruler: For PD, seg height, and alignment.
8. Rimless mount pliers: For pressure mounts, they steady frames.
9. Nylon eyewire forming pliers: This tool saves the day by edging lenses of a different base curve than the shape of the metal frame.
   Forming one or more lens curve of the eyewire is the only way to make a perfect fit of the lens and frame relationship.
10. Slim nosepad adjusting pliers: Great for adjusting pads and arms for alignment, necessary to complete a correct bench alignment.
11. Chappel cutting pliers: Used to cut metal frame temple lengths and to shorten screws, this tool even works to cut drill mount plugs to the correct size.
12. The hand: The most common tool is probably the hand itself, which is used for four-point alignment, to align lenses, move temples in and out, and to adjust pad arms, nosepads, panto and retroscopic tilt, and a score of other tasks.

Many thanks to the professionals who contributed the tips for this month s column: Lyle Olsen, co-owner of LensWorks in Plymouth, Minn.; Bob Smiley, bench manager at Katz & Klein, Inc., in Sacramento, Calif; and Bob Westwood, lab manager at Harbor Optical, Inc., in Traverse City, Mich. EB

QuickTips

If you got into eyecare because your rock star fantasy didn't work out, you can still get use out of your guitar pick. It turns out that these handy gadgets are easy and effective devices that can help mount lenses on nylon rimless jobs.