Three-Dee

At a flea market I found a vintage stereoscope for $3. Considering that eBay often has them in the $50 range and going up from there, it was a pretty good deal even though it was a cheap, mass-produced late model missing the card holder. I couldn't get lenses for $3 so I was already well ahead of the game even if I threw the rest of it away.

Even though the wood of the face was broken in half I wasn't going to throw that away because it was a more intricate piece that I wanted to recreate. I would glue it back together and sand off the awful green paint and hope that the wood underneath was decent enough to stain.

The tin eyeshield would get a fresh coat of paint.

The thin metal plate in front of the lenses would probably go. I couldn't see any difference in functionality without it.

As to the arm without the card holder I decided that I would rebuild that rather than trying to match a manufactured card holder to match the extant arm. I looked online for some design examples and came across the Oliver Wendell Holmes' original stereoviewer patent drawing and decioded that I liked the way the wire focusing arm looked. I would discard the wooden arm completely.

It was suggested that I could use wire hangers as we have plenty of them around the house but I decided that rather than using brass-painted aluminum wire I would use actual brass. I purchased two different gauges, one for the slide and a lighter one for the card holder.

I searched for a handle like the Holmes design or a stand but wasn't able to find quite what I was looking for. Later, when I was shopping for leather at Tandy I saw that they had some sort of wooden leatherworking tool that, even though I had no idea what it was actually for would be perfect as a handle. (And it was on sale.) I still haven't found quite the hinge mechanism with which to attach it but that can wait for another day.

The hardware store didn't have a small piece of wood of the necessary thickness for the base part (into which the wire for the arm would go). The craft store had wood that was too thin but that was much easier to glue together to make the required thickness. Unfortunately, once I was done working on the piece I realized that I had made a cut on the wrong side of the piece and had to start over and build it again. It wasn't a big piece so it was not too traumatic.

The wire for the arm didn't bend perfectly but it's only a minor flaw. The base piece of wood and the bridge are also a little crooked. In trilling the hole to mount the bridge I was out of alignment and drilled through the side. One of the small brass screws in the top sheared off. All minor flaws that do not affect functionality.

And function it does.

It's almost surreal how three dimensional the image is especially when compared to the latest 3-D movie technology. Diffraction gratings cannot compare to lenses taking images directy into the proper eyes, even when the images are medium resolution images downloaded off of the internet. In some ways it seems to have more depth than real life and I can see why stereocards remained popular even as late as the Second World War.

I have downloaded an assortment of images. Portraits. Landscapes. Airships. Nudes. Miscelaneous stuff. But it is not enough. I have been cruising eBay and, while I haven't burchased anything yet, I am considering getting some authentic period cards. I now have a pair of inexpensive fixed-focus digital cameras that I plan on building a stereoscopic mount for. I have also ordered a commercial prismatic lens for my Canon Eos DSLR.

More projects. Now in 3-D!