I’ve got some rimless eyeglasses bought years ago from Zenni that I love and that are in perfect condition w.r.t. the frame, but need new lenses. Zenni won’t sell me the same ones again for some stupid reason (something about reducing the allowed Rx strength on those frames due to customer feedback).
Anybody know a good place to get eyeglass lenses by themselves, so I can cut and drill the damn things to fit the frame myself?
(Note: I’m sure it’s possible to have a brick-and-mortar eyeglass shop do it for $$$$$, but I’m cheap, so no.)
I 3D-print my own frames so I only buy the lenses. I get mine from Hoya because I find their Trivex lenses to be the best. But I can’t order from Hoya directly, and to my knowledge, none of the lens manufacturers deal with customers other than opticians and optical stores.
I get them from my local optician. I made it very clear to them that I’m only coming to their store to get the lenses. I don’t need their services: all I need them for is to order from Hoya on my behalf. They play ball and only take a minimal cut to cover their time processing the order.
I’m curious about what your costs are in actual dollars, although Trivex isn’t right for me because my Rx is so strong that I need a higher refractive index. I also appreciate that your 3D printed glasses link included a video about how the lens edging machine works.
Do you know of any other 3D printed frames that look… less Harry Potter-y?
My prescription is fairly complex - astigmatism and progressive correction with funky-ass zones. And I usually order them extra-thin -which Trivex just about allows in my case - so my glasses are as light as possible (my current 3D-printed pair weighs 11 grams with the lenses. And I have anti-scratch and UV filter coating.
My last pair of lenses cost me 300€. Not cheap, but it’s kind of a one-off as long as my vision doesn’t change and I pay attention never to wipe them with anything other than a clean microfiber and lens-cleaning fluid, to avoid scratching em. If I break the frame, which happens every once in a while when I sit on my glasses, I can have a new one fresh out of the printer in 10 minutes.
Do you know of any other 3D printed frames that look… less Harry Potter-y?
Hehe sorry, I’m addicted to that shape - not for the style, but because small, round glasses are the type of glasses that sit closest to your face, so you get a huge field of vision with small lenses, and you can rest your head on a pillow without breaking the temples. No other style of glasses gives you that. Round lenses aren’t ideal if your correction is oriented - astigmatism - but my design has an anti-rotation notch.
I would suggest you design and model your own frames if you want another style: it’s not super-complicated and it’s really rewarding to wear something you created yourself every day!
My last pair of lenses cost me 300€.
Ah, see, that’s what I was afraid of: Zenni is stupid cheap; the glasses I’m trying to replace were about $70. Granted, that was more years ago than glasses are supposed to go between prescriptions, but still, I was hoping for approximately an order of magnitude less cost for these DIY-cut lenses.
Hehe sorry, I’m addicted to that shape - not for the style, but because small, round glasses are the type of glasses that sit closest to your face, so you get a huge field of vision with small lenses, and you can rest your head on a pillow without breaking the temples. No other style of glasses gives you that.
I like the idea of pillow-compatible glasses, but I already have a bit of resemblance to Harry Pottery that I’m not exactly looking to enhance. I tend to go for rectangular lenses.
It really depends on your prescription. Mine will never come cheap. Even hard-discounters will charge me an arm and a leg for the correction I need.
That doesn’t really explain how you get the lenses cut to the shape of your 3D printed frames. I guess the local shop also does that for you?
No, Hoya does it. I send them a 3D-printed template for their lens edging machine. It’s in the README under Ordering lenses.
Ah, interesting. That definitly wasn’t the case when I worked in such a shop 30 years ago 😅
Bricks-and-mortars can order lens blanks and edge the lenses themselves of course, if they have the edging machine. Older shops still do it. But modern stores just don’t bother anymore: they send the order to whichever supplier they use - often ordering the lenses from one supplier then having them shipped to some el-cheapo country like Vietnam for edging, which is why it takes weeks to get new glasses.
Modern opticians are little more than sellers of overpriced frames, which is why I roll my own. They make money on the frames and lose money on everything else, including fitting. You know how I know that? Because most shops will actually charge you a flat fee if you bring your own frames - including if you do the fitting yourself like I do. It’s properly outrageous.
Have you asked a brick-and-mortar eyeglass shop how much they’d do it for? Independently run places tend to be a lot more accommodating in my experience, and asking’s free. Considering how much of a PITA cutting and drilling your own lenses sounds like it would be (not to mention the possibility of breaking them in the process and having to get new ones), it’s worth asking a couple of different shops first.
I haven’t asked a brick-and-mortar shop yet because I had found out that I couldn’t just buy identical new ones minutes before writing the post. I’ll try that, although I’ll have to do some searching to find an optician around here that isn’t a chain.
Indeed. A long time ago I worked as an internship in one of those places, and cutting the glasses requires special equippment to follow the sample shape and get rid of all the fine dust that is produced while grinding them down. But the work done is usually quite cheap compared to the cost of the glasses themselves, so that is definitly not something I would DIY.
How does the process change when they’re rimless glasses (so the only things I need to be concerned about are getting the pupillary distance and axis right, and then drilling a few holes in the correct spots – the edge is just flat-ground instead of a V-bevel and can be whatever arbitrary shape I want)? Surely that reduces the need for a fancy shape-copying machine, right?
For rimmless glasses they have shapes supplied by the frame manufacturer that the machine can follow. But usually the shape isn’t that important for rimmless glasses so they can likely find a shape in their stock that is similar enough to your current glasses shape.
