Thread: Loupe

I asked my jeweler friend about loupes since he uses them all day every day. Now granted he's not a razor guy so there's that but He said for what you're doing 10x is probably plenty of magnification and there is no need to spend a great deal on the expensive ones. He says he carries cheap ones with him when he travels so he doesn't damage his good ones and he uses those to purchase merchandise. So, take that for what it's worth. The LED lights are nice to have. In all honesty I use a magnifying glass with the additional small inner glass that has a light and that's all the magnification I need. I think it's maybe 6x, maybe not even that. Even so that light makes so much difference it's ridiculous and I don't ever have problems getting it into field view.

10x Hastings triplet achromat is all I need for viewing the razor during honing. The bevel is viewed by reflected light and the edge is viewed in silhouette. A small eyepiece, the standard is Bausch & Lomb, but Otto Frei also has them for jewelry-making purposes for a little bit cheaper. True 10x like this is fine for me. My skin lets me know the rest. Anything higher than true 20x, I don't really need to know about. Ignorance is bliss and all that...

The cheap stuff works good enough, especially the ones with LEDs. My personal favorite is the 10x Belomo Triplet and no LEDs needed if you have a strong worklight. Has a very comfortable focal length and good depth of field. I also have the 20x but the field of view is too small and the focal length too short for comfortable viewing while honing. YMMV. I forget what I paid for the 10x but it wasn't much, way less than a good B&L.

I've tried 20X loupes but find I can see all I need to with my old 10X Carton that I bought 44 years ago for my Geology 101 class. The LED units do give an advantage however.

Don't know what the shipping is to Canada, but these sell for $13 US. What to do about the absence of an LED? Find a light source--sun, halogen desk lamp, bathroom lighting, etc.

Originally Posted by Brontosaurus

Don't know what the shipping is to Canada, but these sell for $13 US. What to do about the absence of an LED? Find a light source--sun, halogen desk lamp, bathroom lighting, etc.

Thanks for looking for me.

I have pretty much settled on this:

https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B07...K4BEZ58R&psc=1

It seems a lot more expensive but what with the conversion to CAD and the shipping it's probably not too much more. I have Prime so the shipping is free and takes two days, and it's lighted.

I won't order it until I get home from my second covid shot tomorrow (Moderna) as a reward to myself for having a needle and being brave

I agree with CCR's comments above about a 20x having too narrow a field of view and too short of a focussing distance. The only way I can use the 20x is to study the edge in silhouette, and even there, micro-chips as noted might not be sensible to the skin. 10x has a wider field of view for studying the bevel and is close enough for studying the edge in silhouette. In France (haven't been there in a while due to Covid), I've used a B&H 14x Hastings triplet and found it to work well for both, so 15x should work as linked. And with a 21mm lens diameter, that should provide a wider field of view relative to the B&H line, whose lens diameters are fairly narrow. The only question with a wider lens is how flat the field is going to be towards the circumference. In essence, when viewing close-up at 15x, one is only using a small portion of the center of the lens in viewing, so a wider diameter lens is not needed. Narrowing the diameter will improve image clarity, sort of like an aperture on a camera lens. Indeed, the Bausch & Lomb Coddington magnifier line works on this principle by including a diaphragm to heighten image clarity with a single lens element, rather than three as in the case of a Hastings triplet.

https://www.amazon.ca/Bausch-Lomb-Ha...5003890&sr=8-7

I've been looking for bench magnifiers but none of them have very good magnification, some have fantastic lights but not very high magnification. This one has up to 10 power with a second glass.
https://www.amazon.com/AORAEM-Helpin...23955718&psc=1
Seems a little inexpensive but it does have magnification up to 10x