Click on this image gallery to follow along with the exciting repair saga. I bought these old binoculars for $12 years ago. One of the eyepiece double lenses had become impossible to see through. It was held together with Canada Balsam that had yellowed, and I took it apart by placing it in boiling water for a few minutes then sliding the two pieces apart. I almost gave up and threw the binoculars away, but then on a whim I bought a bottle of Norland optical adhesive #63 from Edmund optics for like $35 to glue the two halves of the lens back together. With that much money invested, I now felt like I HAD to get these things working again. Everything went smoothly, except losing some of the tiny set screws, and forgetting which side of the lenses was front and back (found out yes this does matter). Put it back together and everything looked terrible, very distorted. Switched all the lenses front to back and reassembled and viola! Now the image looked good. Note to future self, keep track of lens orientation and don’t drop the little set screws!
This is what I started with. I wasn’t sure I was going to remember how it went back together.First step, clean the prisims.A screwdriver that fit better would have helped. The slot was very narrow, and made of soft brass metal. I broke at least one screw.Noticed one of the prisims had a chip missing, but the chip was still held in place by the mount.Decided to try gluing the chip back on with my Norland Optical Adhesive #63 and curing with UV.Not too bad.Before cleaning the prisims.After cleaning.Now to this lens. I put dry erase marker on the surfaces to check the fit (they only fit one way)Then I put a big gob of Norland #63 and pressed them together, wiping the excess off.Apply the UV light to let it cure!Put the prisims back in (they have little positioning posts that stick down)Screw the tube in.Retaining screw goes in first…Then this focus wheel…Lastly the moving eyepiece holders.Eyepiece goes together. Ignore the lens, it is backwards and the other eyepiece lens isn’t shown.And front lenses.Doesn’t look too good. Very distorted.Some random diagram from the internet. Let me try orienting the lenses as it shows. The eyepiece needs to have the more curved faces pointing inward, and the object lens has the more curved face pointing to the target.Ahh, much better.Done! I lost two tiny set screws, so I left all them out. Just means eyepieces can come unscrewed.
I just got a new phone, the Nuu Mobile F4L. It checks several boxes of what I’ve been searching for in a phone.
It is a dumb phone.
It can do group messages! I’ve purchased several dumb phones in the past only to find that they don’t do group text messages. It’s a deal breaker to have to constantly text people back and say, “I can’t read what you just sent me”.
It allows for pretty fast texting. Some dumb phones are really slow, they can’t even keep up with the speed normal people text at. Having a dumb phone already means you are texting slower, so having to wait on the phone to catch up is another deal breaker.
Or, how not to cut your face off… I love watching the YouTube channel “This Old Tony”. I could (and have) spent hours watching him making an espresso pot on the lathe, filing a hole from round to square, or talking about carbide inserts. Recently, on his 500k subscriber special video he talked about his favorite brand of blade for “safety razors”. I was taken aback, aren’t safety razors some outdated thing that went out with beehive hairdos? Well apparently beehives are back (and safety razors never went away).
Faith and I went skydiving back in 2015 before we got married. We had a blast, though when we landed Faith’s instructor said it was the scariest jump of his life. Unbeknownst to us the drogue chute that is used to reduce the terminal velocity when tandem jumping became wrapped around the instructor’s neck briefly. He managed to get it off, but he said it could have ended very badly. You can see this happen at the 50 second mark in the video. Apparently drogue chutes are used when tandem jumping because two people strapped together fall a lot faster than does a single person. This excessive speed could make deploying the main chute more dangerous. Getting tangled up in them isn’t unheard of as you can see in this video of a woman who was injured when the drogue chute wrapped around her ankle and couldn’t be removed by the instructor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ksk2Y9BlUg. We had a great time though, and wouldn’t have even known about this near miss unless he had mentioned it to us.
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