As I’ve said before, I hate seeing things that are broken. Some maternal bit of me always wants to make them better. Were I phenomenally wealthy I’m sure that my extensive house would be home to any number of poorly cars that I have “rescued”.
I also have an unnatural desire to help out where possible and this manifested itself when a colleague ran over her spectacles with an office chair. This bent one of the hinges, although apart from that they survived unscathed. A trip to the optician bent the hinge back so the arm pointed in the right direction but it was still loose and waggled up and down. Annoying as hell to the wearer.
Taking a close look I volunteered to try and fix the problem. When the hinge had bent it moved in the plastic frame and came loose. Ideally stuffing some glue in the hole would take up the slack. Before starting work I made sure the owner was happy for me to do that job at her own risk ! Spectacles are fiddly and expensive, as a full time wearer I know how much they cost. Anyway, if I screwed up I’d literally still have to look her in the eye in future !
On the bench I quickly abandoned the glue idea. The slack to take up was less than 1mm and I didn’t fancy my chances of keeping the glue in the hole neatly.
Instead I pushed some thin plasticard into the hole either side of the hinge and held this in with gap filling superglue. This helped but didn’t entirely cure the wobble. The remaining gap was far too small to get more plastic in though.
I hunted for some shim brass but couldn’t find any. What I did unearth in my spare bit of etch drawer was some phosphor-bronze strip. It’s thin and strong enough to push into a tiny gap. However I decided to be daring and push it in with the tip of the soldering iron. This melts the plastic of the frames enough for the metal to slide in and the molten material grabs as soon as the heat is off. Of course this can go wrong if the iron slips but fortunately it didn’t.
Result – a nice solid hinge. With a little tidying up the result was very neat too. Not bad for 20 minutes work.
Other result – a happy colleague who is relieved not to have to go glasses shopping in the immediate future.
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