Found original part?

[kresty]

FWIW: I added a wiki page for the slide projector http://www.rebeldroids.net/wiki/index.ph..._Projector - with links from the Treadwell Wiki page http://www.rebeldroids.net/wiki/index.ph...nstruction

(I can hear Savage now "Of course you did.")

[Dyne]

Dyne, I hope you're not offended, but I had a couple of minutes this evening so I threw the lens model together.

Not in the slightest. I always figured it was a possibility someone would get to it before me. Thanks for posting it. I'm sure you've done a better job than I could, since I don't have an original part to reference.

[Dyne]

FWIW: I added a wiki page for the slide projector http://www.rebeldroids.net/wiki/index.ph...=Paterson_"Trident"_Slide_Projector - with links from the Treadwell Wiki page http://www.rebeldroids.net/wiki/index.ph...nstruction

The link to the new page that you put on the Treadwell wiki entry is fine, but the first link in your post here is broken.  The forum software is getting confused and thinking that the first quotation mark is the end of the url.

The "insert a link" button on the toolbar in full edit mode escapes the quotation marks properly: http://www.rebeldroids.net/wiki/index.ph..._Projector

[kresty]

FWIW: I added a wiki page for the slide projector http://www.rebeldroids.net/wiki/index.ph...=Paterson_"Trident"_Slide_Projector - with links from the Treadwell Wiki page http://www.rebeldroids.net/wiki/index.ph...nstruction

The link to the new page that you put on the Treadwell wiki entry is fine, but the first link in your post here is broken.  The forum software is getting confused and thinking that the first quotation mark is the end of the url.

The "insert a link" button on the toolbar in full edit mode escapes the quotation marks properly: http://www.rebeldroids.net/wiki/index.ph..._Projector

Oops, I was curious when I used those how it would look in the wiki, and I checked that, but I didn't check after copy/pasting here!  

[halawaliama]

Shawn stuck an ebay search on my ebay account and this popped up:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/PATERSON-TRIDENT...Sw~G1Z2epL

Problem is shipping from the UK, but I thought I would share in case someone cared.

[Vagabond Elf]

Paterson also sold another model of slide viewer, the Viscount. It seems a strange coincidence that it would share the name as the plane the Astromech Holo Projectors come from. 

I know this is necroing this thread really badly - but I wanted to say that this sort of information is why I think this site is very valuable.

Also, some speculation about the names. The Vickers Viscount was operated British European Airways, which mostly flew between the U.K. and the continent. Another aircraft operated by BEAC was the Hawker Siddley Trident. In an era when commericial air travel was still highly romantisised, these names would have been well known - to anyone who'd flown on one of them, at least, even if they weren't household names.

A major, if not the primary, target market for the Paterson slide viewers would have been people who wanted to look at their vacation slides without setting up the whole projector system.

My speculation is that Paterson's marketing department was deliberately evoking the names of the aircraft that British tourists were likely to have flown on, in order to build an association between Paterson's product and the good times people had in Spain, Italy, or Provence.

[kresty]

Someone was asking after the viewers for their star wars room on facebook, and I was wondering if files had been made for the entire housing, or just the lens_

[Conqueror_Worm]

I finally got around to buying one of these, and I think I've made a very accurate model of the lens.
I made a series of paper templates, with different radii cut out, and the 65mm radius seems to be a perfect match:


The back of the lens is completely flat:

I haven't been able to remove the lens, so I placed a spacer on the back of the lens, measured the total thickness of the lens and spacer, then subtracted the thickness of the spacer to get a lens thickness of 13mm. I assumed the perimeter of the lens has the same dimensions as the perimeter of the retaining ring. Here is the model I ended up with (Link to STL).

[kresty]

Cool!

[Dyne]

Nice job. That's the power of having the actual part to measure.