my glasses

image by Poppy Thorpe

My glasses are a pair of Mykita Claas. Here is a pair on ebay. I've had these glasses for over 6 years now and i'm sure in some small way they define me. That being said, since I broke them, i've been wearing my old glasses to very little effect. Take me back to when people gave a shit. 

fig 2. Or shouldn't

Glasses are, for anyone who wears them (whether they like it or not), a part of our physical identity, and subtly convey our interests in a way that other crutches cannot (fig 2.). It is because of this that i'm often so suprised at how little people are willing to spend on their glasses, and I suppose that this itself is insight into a bespectacled persons (misaligned) priorites.

So what do my glasses say about me? It's been a while since I was the person I was when I chose them so i'm bit hazy on the details. I know that gold was a departure from the norm. Up until that point I had always considered myself a silver person, which in my mind would correlate with a prefence for cats (and gold for dogs) although I'm not sure why. In retrospect I suppose I was trying to distance myself from the round tortoishell glasses and harry potter jibes that plauged my youth, and which to this day I have no satisfactory retort. 

Friction hinge 'whorl' on Mykita Lite frames

On a more meta level it is the hollistic approach to the design of the glasses, from production to advertisement, that I appreciate and wish to be associated with. This video frames my previous sentiments perfectly. The music, Dot by composer Chilly Gonzales, trips along with certainty, rolling through tempos with the confidence that expertise is rewarded with. Musically it reflects a combination of the two worlds that Bert Haanstra initally contrasts in his 1959 film Glas. That is the freedom of experienced hands to play with process and technique, and the apparent rigidity of mass manafacture. Dot marches tenderly to the confluence of man and machine; stamped, pressed, spun, bent, by both.                         

 

Perhaps that was a load of pretentious waffle (the answer to which is always to some degree, yes) and I don't want to conflate this advert with the brand because that's not what i'm trying to fetishize, but rather that this video conveys thoughtfulness and ingenuity in the process of making a pair of glasses, as well as in its depiction. And that when I sat on my glasses, and they broke, so did part of my face, and that they are worth repairing. 

The frames are made of very thin stainless steel. I temporarily superglued everything together, topping up as it inevitably broke apart. I also tried soldering the arm back together but stainless steel requires both special flux and wire to be soldered together and in hindsight, combined with a very small surface area to solder to, it was never going to work. 

An optician suggested I send it to a man with a very expensive laser welder but he sounded like a bond villian so I didn't trust him. Instead i've decided to CNC the front piece of the frame out of titanium.

This is a good oppotunity to talk about process. A number of projects require you to copy an existing object into 3D modeling software which is difficult to do accurately without a scale canvas to work off of. By placing your object next to something of known scale and taking a photo tangent to the object you can use fusion 360's scale canvas feature to produce an accurate canvas to work from. 

For such a simple model generating logical tool paths is incredibly simple. I suppose it needn't be very hard but it is very impressive to use such a powerful tool as a complete novice without feeling intimidated. 

Tooling is from APT tools.

0.5mm end mill

The titanium plate was glued down to a flat piece of foam to prevent the need for tabs, but I didn't do a very good job, and the first pass pulled the part from the foam 'ruining' it. I don't dislike the hole in the brace, and it has made me wonder if it's worth doing something with this space instead of just hollowing it out. Although i'm not sure if the possibility that this will become a suntan stencil outweighs any benefit.  

Unfortunately the limits of the pure titanium were immediately apparant as it was incredibly soft, and easy to bend, with none of the spring of the stainless steel original. I hope that this is an issue with this particular grade of titanium, grade 1, which is 100% pure, and i've ordered an alloy, grade 5 which will hopefully solve these tissues.   

anodising with a blow torch

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spidercrank

I needed to buy new cranks which is fairly daunting because cranks are fairly specific things. To give you a taster this was the title of my mental wanted ad on retrobike: 175mm 110BCD Shimano XTR FC-M952 JIS taper, crank arms only. Obviously this was an impossible ask as the FC-M952 crank only came with Shimanos proprietry (take a shot) octolink spline, but you already knew that. 

A different pair of cranks then, and after multiple messages back and forth to an ebay seller to make sure I wasn't paying for something I couldn't use, and being confidently reassured that I was in fact getting what I needed...

haha, every cloud has an alminum lining!

So i needed a new blue bit, and on these RS7? middlburn cranks it's a seperate piece held onto the crank arm with a combination of proprietry (shot) spline and proprietry (shot) lockring. They're also about £70 new, and impossible to find used. Talking to Odin my predicament came up and he suggested we mill something on his 5 axis (3 functioning) cnc machine. Although for Odin the problem is a secondary concern to the solution, which is always, mill something on the cnc machine. As far as I know, he's never been wrong.

Doing the bare minimum, my specialty!

Autodesk just released Generative software as part of a Fusion360's subscription. This basically takes force input on a part, in this case, rotational force on the chainring bolt holes and spline interface, and then uses a machine learning algorithim to optimise material placement accounting for those force inputs. The pictures show this iterative process as it goes from viable to tenuous to laughable. This had me pretty worried  

that we'd underestimated the load and where it would be applied as some of the outcomes seemed to be held together by faith alone, but this is a happy story with a happy ending so no worries.

I overnighted some 6061 aluminum stock and watched Brodin setting up the tool paths for his machine. This is some nerd shit and tbh it's pretty boring to watch and I can't imagine it's that fun to do either so thanks again man. 

These tool paths are translated into a language the machine can understand, essentially loads of XYZ coordinates, called gcode and then it's the future and the machine does all the work. Except it's not and you're Odin and you're constantly worried the machine will decide to start milling your part out of itself instead of your stock. But it still is a little bit the future as the part gradually emerges from the seminal coolant. 

all the tool paths for the front side

 

HAAS Super Mini Mill if you're in the market

 

Thanks for watching!

I do all of these posts on my computer and i've realised that the formatting is a bit funky on phones which I imagine is what most people will use to read these so i'll work on that in future. 

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