Awesome: These German Safety Goggles made of shiny steel and safety glass are being imported to North America by Lee Valley Tools.
Even More Awesome: A quick lens swap turns them into incredibly cool costume 3D goggles.
On their own, they’re incredibly good looking goggles with an adjustable nose strap and adjustable elastic band to hold them on. The metal lens holders unscrew to add optional welding shades.
(Note: We’re not 100% sure what metal these are made of. It’s shiny. It looks like steel, and a magnet sticks to it. But the product page when you buy them mentions aluminum. Sigh.)
When you take the original lenses out, you can see that they are made of traditional safety glass: two layers of glass laminated together with a plastic layer in between. They’re 50 mm in diameter.
We laser cut new discs out of 1/8″ thick red and blue transparent acrylic— out of scrap from the cases of red and blue Alpha Clock Five.
Remove the glass lenses and screw on the red and blue ones.
Now it should be noted that while these are brightly colored and beautiful, acrylic is normally not a suitable material for protective lenses. So, these are definitely for costume use only, at least until you put the original lenses back in.
Now you’re ready to party in 3D!
You can find more costume projects in our Halloween Project Archive.
My Eyes! The goggles do… something!
It would be fun to snag a pair of those horribly uncomfortable movie theatre 3D glasses, snip the lenses out, then toss them in these.
Out of stock at Lee Valley, until October! Here they are at Garrett Wade: http://www.garrettwade.com/german-made-real-shop-safety-goggles/p/45A04.04/ (Image search at google for German safety goggles finds more sources.)
Thanks!
would it be possible to cut prescription lenses to size, insert them first into the goggles and then the safety ones? or would that be dangerous?
You can get them straight from Manufactum* if you’re in Europe.
One of my pairs now has a leather strap (rather than the original elastic) and a few other modifications.
@dr15. You could put prescription lenses in them, but don’t expect them to be as good as your specs. Prescription depends partly on how far from your eyes the lenses are (Back Vertex Distance), if you require varifocals you would need to ensure that you are looking through the correct part of the lens, and if you’re astigmatic rotation would matter.
R.E. materials, the German website lists them as “Verzinntes Stahlblech”, which translates as tinned steel.
* http://www.manufactum.de/schutzbrille-schraubring-p753687/
Whilst I doubt it would be considered ‘good working practice’, if you DO need to work while wearing 3D safety goggles, here are 2 approaches you might want to look at (no pun intended..;) ):
1: Simply colour one side the original lenses – preferably the INSIDE, so you don’t scratch it off. Quickest would be felt-/fibre-tip pens, but you might also get away with glass paints. This would, of course, risk making the lenses unsuitable for non-3D use, so you’d have to have some replacements.
2: Laminate your own lenses. Cut 4x50mm circles out of some 1.5mm-thick glass (I don’t know if you can get ‘toughened’ glass in that sort of thickness), and sandwich red and blue acetate discs between them. I’d suggest your acetate discs be no more than 48mm in diameter, to allow a 1mm bead of a glass-bond adhesive to bond the 2 glass discs together. This would be a lot of work (and potential expense) for something that probably wouldn’t be ‘legal’, though…
Am I the only person who thought this was a Despicable Me goggle project after looking at the first picture? Pretty cool for $15.
Those are cool :P like a pilot`s googles. Pilot hat from this site: http://sterkowski.com would be great with it i think, and also some scarf.