The End Of Executive Bifocals

Say it ain't so! Oh no! I guess I'm gonna have to pay through the nose... and that is one Big Nose!
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#franlab #glasses #prices
- Music by Fran Blanche -

[brentrn]

I found 2 places that have executive bifocals, Payne Glasses and Rx Safety. Neither can make them in my prescription. They are limited to less than -6.0 Sphere.

[Tibyon]

The loss of small scale manufacturing is really devastating

[spehropefhany]

The Franklin blanks are still manufactured by a major (2500+ employees) supplier in Shanghai (1.56 Hi-Vex SF Executive Bifocal
from Conant) and you can apparently get them in the US from Glazzers (as finished glasses). So it's the local guys who have decided that the profit margin isn't there for the demand that remains.

[valerief]

This is so damn frustrating. I got gaslit into getting progressive lenses with my last glasses, and I couldn’t bear going back for a fourth time to get these $680 buyers remorse purchase adjusted AGAIN. I hate them, I’ve had them 2 years now and have to constantly move my head and eyes around to see what I’m looking at. I finally dug out my old glasses that’s frames kept breaking (don’t bother with Americas Best for frames) and went up there, spent $75 on the same frames that lose the left arm piece after a few months, just so I can see again. I’m extremely careful with them, so if I’m laying in bed reading I switch to cheap readers with a 3.50 magnification so I won’t accidentally fall asleep in my executive lenses. It’s ridiculous how greed is the only focus for every business in the world now.

[ALCV]

Dealing with the loss of my close vision has been the most heartbreaking thing. I've been high myopic with unstable astigmatism and floaters for 38 years, and the one thing I could do was close work. Around the same time I started losing my close vision, I had a posterior vitreous detachment that caused huge floaters in my non-dominant eye. I feel downright handicapped at this point.

[yardleybottles]

I had a boss retired USAF Col. He didn't have to yell. Just looked at you over those bifocals. That was all he needed

[KeritechElectronics]

Looks like they're still around in Poland, known here as "Franklin bifocals" or simply "Franklins". TIL!

[quantumrage]

Hey Fran, you can try to contact a lab in Indianola Iowa called Laramy K. I know when executives were discontinued, they bought as much of them as they could. They might be able to help you.

[jonathansnow]

It's a funny quirk of capitalism that markets fail, and this is one way that markets fail. You would think that under capitalism "you can get anything" but in fact, there's just one supply chain and if you want something other than what that supply chain provides you are SOL. Love your videos, and thansk for noticing this.

[scorpionderooftrouse]

Well…when one door closes, another one slams in your face.

[FraidyZone]

I got a similar surprise just yesterday. I’m like, for that price, I not only want bifocals but also some x-ray and night vision!😆

[Hanover_Fist]

Fran, The executive was to be discontinued 30 years ago. The demand was crazy high so Cr39(plastic) remained. Your senitivities to measurements, I am sure, are mostly due to you having worn Executives for so long. A good optician should have had this conversation with you 25-30 years ago. The biggest drawback to executives from the patient standpoint is the fixed optical centers (OCs) of the near segment. The flat top 45s will be far superior if the measurements for gaze, PD and OC heights were taken and fabricated properly. The exec has alway been a bear to edge (cut and fit) properly. Often this needed to be done manually, especially for cyls above 1.00 diopters on oblique axes. You have adapted to the 18th century technology instead of the tech being adjusted to fit you. This happens over time and typically causes your gazes to be out of standard spec.ratios. This muscle and nerve memory can feel almost impossible to over come. I hope your new optician is successful and makes the transition as smooth as possible. P.S. Don't be thrown by the reflection off of the top "shelf" of the ft45s. Improvise, Adapt, Overcome!!

P.S.S. ..Your dry eye will probably cause your RX to move around a bit. USE THOSE DROPS RELIGIOUSLY!!!

[KaptainGonzo]

I looked at progressive lenses a while back. Then classic bi-focals. The price difference was $200 to $400!!! Bi-focals were the less expensive option. Additionally, I could specify where I wanted 'the line', I like mine very low and small. At some point I'm going to have to get new glasses. If bi-focals are gone, I'm in trouble.

[mikebarushok]

I've been wearing glasses for 57 years. Extremely near-sighted and unstable astigmatism. Imbalance of weight has permanently distorted my nose. The weight issue was greatly improved when plastic lenses became common. In my sixties I couldn't get correction to 20-20 because of cataracts. Got them removed and paid extra for one eye to get astigmatism corrective lens. Distance vision restored to slightly better than 20-20 but need reading glasses for near vision. Got my optometrist to order "bifocals" but that have zero correction above the line and with the line higher than typical. Paid extra for glass lenses because they're so much harder to scratch when cleaning them. Another option was half frame reading glasses that I simply look over for distance vision. I no longer have to be listed as "corrective lenses required" on a driver's license.

[flymypg]

I started needing reading glasses in my mid-30s, and for the next three decades I was plagued by scratching, losing and breaking reading glasses. Finally, my distance vision degraded by a quarter diopter in one eye, enabling me to qualify for insurance coverage for bifocals.

I got progressive bifocals 3 years ago, and literally haven't looked back since. I was fortunate as I needed less than two days to be confident using them for day-to-day work, and it took another week for me to trust them for driving at night, to the point that I now feel naked without my glasses.

I got the least expensive lenses (hourglass-shaped transition), in case I couldn't tolerate them, and haven't yet found any need to upgrade to the fancy-schmancy wide-transition lenses. But, with the reading glasses lessons learned, I got flexible titanium frames with polycarbonate lenses, which have already paid for themselves several times over (I'm still tough on glasses - these tolerate it far better).

Still, it took me a year (until I got my second frameset under insurance) for me to finally get rid of most of my reading glasses. After going through the entire house, I found over 20 pairs (including 5 in my car!). I still use a +3 pair for reading in bed (magnetic ones, so I don't break them when I fall asleep while reading), and a +2.5 pair that I stack over my regular glasses for electronics and other small, fine work. (Yes, the progressives are very useful behind fixed reading glasses.)

My progressives have slightly changed how I move my head, turning my neck a bit more to use the center section (which will likely force fancy lens upgrades as my neck mobility decreases with age), and tilting my head as needed to get the precise focus I need for the task at hand (most noticeable as I move my gaze up and down my huge computer monitor).

There are tricks and techniques available to help when the adjustment to progressives isn't as effortless as mine, which apparently are 100% effective when there is no complicating condition present. For weeks after getting her progressives, my sister felt she was falling forward when walking, until a simple trick fixed it in literally a couple of minutes.

[lynsnyder]

Fran, 30 years ago I worked in optical labs for 8 years grinding lenses. I understand what you are talking about. I remember the executive lenses were difficult to get the outside bifocal edge thickness correct without going too thin. I ruined so many.
I remember there was a trifocal executive lens as well. The regular small segment bifocals come in 28mm and 35mm wide.
For small prescriptions, I prefer good ol' CR-39 Acrylic lenses because they are so clear and have practically no chromatic aberration. Polycarb is really terrible with chromatic aberration but is lightweight and impact resistant. Anyway, I could go on and on. Good luck finding lenses you like.

[talfacprez]

My dad is the only person I knew who needed trifocals. My mom and my siblings would laugh at my dad occasionally when he would raise and lower his head several times while he was trying to read something and the font of the letters he was reading were sort of in between two of his lenses.

[SeanBZA]

I would say the reason is that the executive requires them to cut the same script twice on 2 blanks, and then cut the lens in half, and use optical cement to join them together. so they need to get the script right on both, and also get the tint and film exactly the same, so might need to remake one, and then cut them in half, and glue them together, then do the final polish.

Going overseas is not going to work, those lenses are made by a few worldwide companies, and airfreighted by courier weekly to each country, and from there to the local optometrists. My last lenses came half way around the planet, electronic script sent to Italy for the cutting and polishing, then the photochromic and UV layers, and then sent as a pair of marked disks back, marked with a sticker for optical centre, and a marker for horizontal and vertical axes, so the optometrist could take them, place in a adjustable frame, and test fit them to correspond to my optical axis, so as to get them right, then measured and wrote down the correct offsets, and sent them, along with the selected frame, to a local company, who used the dimensions to grind them down to fit the frame, and put them in.

Yes also have astigmatism, my optometrist wanted to see the equipment at the practice he was doing a locum at, so the 3 hour appointment, nominally a 1 hour slot, but no real clients that week, involved him looking at the slight drift in script with age, then a few minutes with an automatic measurement 5 mniute scanner, agreeing closely with the standard chair and lens set. Then 3 different intraocular pressure measuring devices as there were 3 there, all slightly different, from an old one that taps the eye, to one that uses a puff of air, and the latest that uses ultrasonic wizardry and sound.

Then an hour staring into a optometric CT scanner, which showed up that the one eye is slightly oval, my retinas are perfect, the fovea is fine and good, I have no cataracts at all, and also a 3d structure of both the lens, the cornea, the vitreous body densities, and a map of the retina down to the back wall of the eye, complete with the dip for the optic nerve. Plus all the blood vessels. All done using a camera and IR trackers to track eye movement, and also a red target that moved around, while the eye was being imaged in various wavelengths of IR and visible light, so as to get structure and depth.

[balahmay]

Retired optometrist here. Your reporting on this preference for executive bifocals matches my years of experience. Anyone who has been used to executive bifocals is not going to easily accept anything else, especially a progressive. I believe there is literally an executive bifocal personality type. There is a problem with how the execs fit into the frame bevel on the temporal sides, especially for myopes. But I think you will be fine with the D-45 bifocal if you give them a fair (long enough) trial. If you get a slightly smaller eye size frame (52-54mm) a bridge size that also is not very wide (16), with a typical near pupil distance of 60mm the bifocal will need to decenter nasal 4-5 mm. That will have the bifocal still reaching over to about 11mm from the temporal side of the frame. That is plenty, especially when you consider that peripheral acuity is quite poor anyway. One other disadvantage of the executive is that they often result in the upper part of the lenses being quite a bit thicker than they would otherwise be. Often no 2 pairs of prescription lenses feels the same because the lenses induce various unavoidable prismatic effects depending on how the optical centers are lining up and how close they sit. Different frames align the lenses slightly differently with your super sensitive and precisely controlled visual system, and so you feel that difference. The stronger the lenses the worse all of this is. Glasses are always a bit of a compromise. Good luck.

[georgH]

Here in southern Europe, you go to the optometrist-optician, and they measure your prescription, contacts, pressure, etc, and they do everything in the same shop, you barely pay anything extra for the fitting. All shops do that.

You go to the ophthalmologist every few years for a check-up and for medical issues, not for external optical correction.