FIX AND FIT

A Manual for The Mangled

A guide to fixing common misalignments due to bridge issues

in my 41 years as an optician, I have encountered eyewear that has been mangled in more ways than could possibly be listed here. Perhaps one reason I became an optician in the first place was finding my own mangled eyewear underneath a car I had been riding in that rolled three times and landed in a ditch on its roof.

Anyone who has been in the business of adjusting eyewear for a while has a good story or two to tell as well. Surprisingly, one of the most common stories I have heard from patients is how they dozed off in their reclining chair and awoke to find that their glasses had fallen into the chair’s side mechanism.

Whatever the patient’s misadventure with their eyewear, the bridge often seems to take the brunt of the damage.

BEGIN WITH THE BRIDGE

The bridge should always be the starting place for any alignment of mangled eyewear, since it controls the two identical halves of the frame. If the bridge is not tended to first, the rest of the alignment is moot.

There are three planes of adjustment involved with the bridge:

Make the lenses co-planar as opposed to being twisted (or propeller-like).



Adjust the skew from front to back and correct the face form.



Adjust the frontal vertical skew, which can be as radical as having one lens drooping down on one side and upswept on the other.

Each of these misalignments can be corrected fairly easily. Let’s look at them one at a time.

While some eyewear gets mangled beyond repair, minor problems can often be fixed by starting with the bridge

TWISTED LENSES: When the lenses are twisted like an airplane propeller, the pantoscopic tilt of each eye is disturbed and the effective power and prism of the lens is changed. To correct this, hold the bridge/eyewire on each side and simply twist it back, paying attention to not alter any other plane of adjustment. How can you be sure the lenses are properly aligned with each other? Shine a penlight directly at the front surface of the lenses. Its reflection will be seen at the same level (from the bottom or top) in both lenses. This method is much more precise than just eyeballing it.

A “propellered” bridge and the resulting twisting of the eyewires

FACE FORM SKEW: Have the tops of the temples lying on your bench with the front of the frame hanging off the edge, but with the bridge as close to the edge as possible (see photo, right). Ideally, both ends of the bridge should be the same distance from the table edge. A good goal for face form is about a 3mm gap from the bridge end to the table on each side for a frame smaller than a 50 eye, and up to about a 10mm gap on each side for a 60 eye frame.

If the bridge is too close on one side, put a thumb on the back of that side and push with your thumb, while pulling back with your fingers on the front of the other side of the bridge and the front of the lens on the same side. Though it usually requires just a slight push, you should have the sensation that if you continued, you would fold the frame in half.

An example of a face form skew: Ideally, both ends of the bridge would be the same distance from the table edge

FRONT VERTICAL SKEW: Put the top of both eyewires against the table edge, looking straight down to see if one end of the bridge is closer to the table edge than the other side. If it is, you will need to brace the end of the bridge you wish to bend with your thumb and forefinger and roll the entire eyewire up to bring the bridge away from the table edge (or down on the other side to move that side of the bridge closer). The end result should have the bridge (though usually curved) running parallel to the table edge, and cylinders on axis and PAL side marks or bifocal lines running straight across.

With a vertical skew issue, one end of the bridge is clearly lower than the other

—Alex Yoho, ABOM