maybe polarizing contact lenses would help?

 I caught a deal on eBay and got this 3.25 / 85mm (.0001) dial indicator, cheap.  My other tenths indicator is dodgy, this one seems believable. 

 Big dial, big gradations, big pointer, big numbers, I figured it would be easier on this old gray duck's eyeballs. Well yes, but also no.

 You see, I can't hardly see through the crystal.  The yellowing is much darker in reality than it appears in this photo.  It also has brown cruft floating around between crystal and dial face, which seems to be old adhesive holding crystal into bezel.

A larger issue is it not returning to zero sometimes.  I'm investigating whether that is something I can fix or not.  The guts of these things resemble big watches, with a fine clockspring on the pointer, a fine coil spring on the plunger, and many fine gears between the two.  I am reluctant to stick my clumsy mitts in there.

 This thing entered the workforce when not only the tools smoked, all the workers and management did too.

 I'm going to investigate having a shop try to replace the crystal first because to DIY I'd have to:

• buy a small bench top arbor press
• fabricate delrin dies to turn it into a lens press
• find a way to carefully cut out a circle of acrylic for it
• find a way to fixture said disk to turn a tiny lip in the edge

 Ugh! Can I not, please?

 Even so, I'm mighty pleased to have her on board.  For now, I shall call her... "Amber".

~≈{👁}≈~