I have printed and cut templates to make my own slide wheels for the viewmaster goggles. Attempting to print on photo transparencies proved unsuccessful, and printing on regular paper revealed that the dpi of my home printer is not high enough to produce a recognisable image at that scale. Instead i have backed the wheels onto some pre-existing printed media of a higher quality. One is a section of Georgian newspaper, with a good level of translucency to allow light into the viewmaster, the other samples cut from an atlas of greater london. The effect produced is interesting as the papers opacity reveals both sides of the double sided prints, however I am unable to see the quality of depth created by the two eye-holes. As i am blind in one eye, I had to ask my parents to describe to me the effect created by the overlapping of left and right slides. My own inability to interpret this layer of technical experimentation poses both limitations and potential advantages, although i cannot lay claim to some kind of unique perspective, since anyone can close one eye and see the same thing.
Another issue I encountered with is experiment is the quality of the card used for the wheel template. The original wheels have a thin metal plate sandwiched between card, with the film photos inlaid in each slide square- presumably die-cut. The card I have is significantly weaker, and my ability to cut clean rounded edges for the slide squares is limited. when testing the slides i saw the frayed edges and inconsistent cuts are extremely noticeable through the magnified lens, this would be ideally executed with a laser cutter or some other CAD CAM technology. The weakness of the card also means that the wheels are prone to getting caught in, torn or crushed by the mechanical rotary arm.
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