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