2025
October
3
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Fixing Dad's binoculars
This slightly odd-looking pair of binoculars constitutes the completion of a 56-year-old project;
it feels almost like paying off an old debt.
The only astronomical instrument I've used regularly since my first attempts at astronomy as a child
was a 7×50 monocular, originally the right half of my father's binoculars.
A couple of years after my father died, I was given the binoculars and found that the left eyepiece
had been damaged.
I didn't know of a way to repair it and ended up removing the left half of the binoculars and taking it apart,
leaving a monocular and also learning a lot about optics.
I continued to use the monocular for decades; I last did astronomy with it last night.
A couple of years later, I learned that the repair might not have been so hard after all, and I regretted
scrapping the seemingly unrepairable left half.
Ever since, I've felt that in some sense I owed my deceased father a pair of binoculars.
Not any more. On Cloudy Nights, in the Free to Good Home message thread, I recently came across two pairs of 7×50 binoculars
almost identical to my father's, in salvage-for-parts condition.
Tinkering with them, I managed to get a complete, working left half that matched my monocular.
Now my father's binoculars are binoculars again!
They look battle-worn, and they have a screw for an axle because neither of the axles in the salvaged
lot was quite right, but they work. I am looking forward to looking at the stars with them.
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