The eyes have it.

I always had great eyesight...

Until a couple of years ago when it turned out that...

I don't.



Back then, after much squinting while driving, I was encouraged to go for an eye test. Glasses for driving made reading street signs much easier, But I'm still ok reading a book or on the computer.

But not so much for working on models. And Z scale isn't exactly the easiest to work in when it comes to kitbashing and cleaning up rolling stock. Over the past few years, my really, really closeup eyesight has me struggling to focus on model rollingstock work.

If you fall into the same boat, may I suggest two visionary tools

1)   $2 glasses from a discount store. These are great for detail work. The downside is that I only find them useful when looking at things up really close, so need to keep flipping them up away from my eyes to find the knife or that paintpot - which is right in front of me but somewhere out in the fuzzy zone that extends beyond my nose when wearing the glasses.

Because of this ok-up-close but impossible-to-focus-further-out, that I've found those closeup (reading) glasses to be a bit headache inducing unless you're only doing closeup work all at once.


2) One of these I find more helpful:

Because it's easy to get closeup assistance when needed by placing items under the magnifier, but your eyes are also free and unencumbered to look at things further out with ease (now, where did I put that knife... hint: in the magnifier).

This example is a fairly cheap one from a craft store with LED lighting you can turn on and off as needed and lots of light is really important to pep up the contrast when your eyesight starts to decline.

An older example I had in the US had a hinged cover to protect the lens which this doesn't have, so some paper is placed on top when it is not in use. By the way, in the picture above taken from a distance, those UFOs are roof lightbulb reflections in the glass that are not visible when in normal use.

I love these magnifiers for painting and assembling fiddly details - if a model looks ok from this close-up then it will look superb from a normal viewing distance.