Doing The StewMac Optivisor Mod

I’m a big fan of Stewart Macdonald’s products and Dan Erlewine’s great videos for them. Thanks to Dan, I’ve been using an Optivisor “binocular magnifier” for a while now. It’s great for any kind of repair or final detail work, fixing guitars, installing equipment, preparing props to be photographed. I really wanted to do the mod to attach two sets of lenses to one headset. The Optivisor ships with a No.4 lens plate, giving 2x magnification, as adding the No.2 plate, for 1.5x magnification (focussing at 20 inches, instead of 10), makes it much more useable.

Dan used some spare binding to attach the two lenses and I tried to DIY something with old plastic I had sitting around the workshop. Suffice to say the results were hilariously bad. In the end a better solution was some thin wood strips from Tokyu Hands here in Tokyo.

The only issue now is the weight of the two battery packs, with 2 AA batteries in each, make the headset feel a little unstable. I’m wondering if it might be possible to replace those with a single Li-On rechargeable battery in the future. Time for another trip to Akihabara!

Doing this video also made me appreciate the work that goes into full time DIY channels on YouTube, especially from folks like Jimmy Diresta and ILikeToMakeStuff. I’m still trying to get my head around shooting and editing video, but doing all that while also trying to draw and cut straight lines and make the right sized holes was a challenging bit of fun.