General Purpose Tools

Wearable Magnifying Glasses

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A magnifying glass for your head

I can’t count the number of times I have found myself needing to use both hands on a very small project. Fixing a pair of glasses, pulling a splinter, soldering small electronics, the list goes on. One solution previously reviewed on this site is the third hand. It works pretty well, but it doesn’t move and I find it difficult to get a clear view of more than a small area of what I’m working on using a magnifying glass.

I looked online for the magnifying glasses that dentists use. Good quality ones are in the hundreds of dollars, and the cheap ones all got bad reviews, except for one with a really funny name. The “Housweety Professional Jeweler’s Lighted Magnifier Visor” at amazon is currently around $8 (yes, that’s eight dollars), and since I got it it about six months ago it has become my go-to tool for anything requiring high magnification.

It makes it very easy to work on very small things with both hands. I like it better than a mounted magnifying glass because it has a separate lens for each eye which makes the focus clearer and since it moves with your head you aren’t limited to working on a bench. It flips up out of the way when you don’t need it. It has five different power lenses (1x, 1.5x, 2x, 2.5x, 3.5x). It also has a little light on it. I just used the glasses to remove a really small splinter from my dog’s paw and the light worked out very well. It was bright enough to see what I was doing.

I think it’s a cool tool because it allows me to easily do things that were difficult or impossible before, it’s inexpensive, and I use it a lot more than I expected I would.

-- Gary Klaus 08/27/15

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