A very special job

Normally when I receive a frame in this condition the most honest and helpful thing to do is to just send it back and tell the store that it's not worth the time and effort to bother with the repair. But in this case, it had some very significant sentimental value to the patient, so we decided to go through with the repair.

When I got this frame it was in two pieces. Broken apart at the bridge, dried, cracked acetate, highly distorted bridge even after fusing, several stress cracks at the temples on both sides, and complete breaks on both temple bends, and nicks an scratches from wear and tear.

-Starting from the left, we can see a full break at the right temple bend

-Bridge break was really bad. The bridge not only broke, but bulged from twisting torque on the frame

-Another full break at the mid point of the left temple

-Finally a stress break with missing material.

The first thing to do was to join the frame front back together. The issue was the heavy stress on the bridge which caused a twist and bulge in the material which prevented a perfect reattachment. This is sort of what happened to the plastic (to a lesser degree).

https://youtu.be/8qGHWZm0C-o?t=79

This also made adding a metal dowel impossible since the material was warped and needed to be bent back into place.

As you can see below, there's a deep groove and twist in the frame even after joining the parts back together. And the resulting bond effectively put X'ing at around 45 degrees

Gradual application of heat and very minor adjustments over time was the key to bending this back into place. To adjust from 45 degrees and crank it all the way back would have resulted in the joint breaking again. So it was generously heated and adjusted about 5 degrees at a time over the course of a few days.

Next were the temples. This involved slow application and reapplication of acetone glue over and over again effectively layering coat upon coat of acetate and rebuilding and filling in the cracks and missing spaces on the frame.

The application of acetone glue is really finicky and hard to work with. Hopefully in the future I'll get a better mastery of this to ensure an even better finish. I think the hardest part is the waiting. Once you apply one layer, you have to wait until it's completely dry before adding the next, otherwise the acetone in the material just melts the original layer and creates grooves and bubbles. Unfortunately very difficult to avoid. I really learned a lot from this job, and hope to improve and further refine the process in the future. Here's the final result.