If you, like I do, wear glasses and use an older Leica M w. a metal eyepiece, you may find the following useful.

Leica can replace the metal eyepiece w. the M6 rubber type. Someone in this forum mentioned a price of $80 to have it replaced. Some may find this price insignificant, I am on a budget and find it outrageous (especially when keeping in mind that a similar eyepiece for my Nikon FE cost $10!).

Stephen Gandy sells a sticker type vinyl protector for $6. This option seem very reasonable and simple. If I lived in the USA I would have bought it. I live in Denmark and the cost of transaction ($ exchange and postage) would probably add $6-8 to this price.
I tried to make my own but, as Gandy writes, it is not as easy as it may seem. Aesthetically my attempts were pathetic :-(

One day I came across some black O-rings which had the perfect thickness and diameter of the M ocular. I tried to split them in half with a sharp knife -which turned out to be impossible to do evenly.
Instead I found that the cutting discs included with most Dremel kits could cut the O-ring perfectly. It is easier if you attach the O-ring over a round piece of wood or a plastic pen, secure the Dremel tool and move the wood/pen, rather than the other way around.

I degreased the ocular and used a thin layers of contact glue to attach the splitted O-ring. The result looked perfect, and it was a very satisfying exercise. I have used the camera for about 3 months, and the ring still remain securely attached.

The O-rings were $0.25 each at the hardware shop, I already had the glue and Dremel tool :-)

Does anyone else have alternative solutions to the "eyeglasses scratching problem"?

-- Niels H. S. Nielsen (nhsn@ruc.dk), February 01, 2002

Answers

I tried it myself, making protectors from self-adhesive foam, but these fell off after 2 weeks of use.
But until now I had no problems with scratches on my glasses, maybe due to the high quality glass I had to choose to avoid these thick glasses (-9 is nothing to joke about). My glasses from Zeiss were quite expensive, coated und astonishingly scratchproof, even metal leica eyepieces don't cut it ;-)

-- Kai Blanke (Kai.blanke@iname.com), February 01, 2002.

This sounds like a job for a specialist... Any ideas Lutz?

-- Brooks (bvonarx@home.com), February 01, 2002.

Another way to do it is to use the red rubber washers used for garden hoses. The inside diameter of the washer fits snuggly around the ocular and it is just a bit thicker so your glasses wont touch the metal. I used a little double sided tape to keep it on and trimed the top off the washer with a knife so it was flush with the top of the camera.

I did this to my old M3 and it never fell off. It wont look as professional as Niel's trick, but you won't need a dremel and don't need to use glue.

I got the idea from a camera I saw on ebay a couple of year ago

john

-- john locher (locherjohn@hotmail.com), February 01, 2002.