New Goggle Project: Part 5

Eventually I will have found a name for these goggles and it won't have to be "New Goggle Project" all the time.  For now, I am going to focus on the items I decided to use on the sides of the goggles.  I want to explore more of the armature type items and this one I built from various different parts.  I took an arm from a lot of spare clock parts I had, a couple of gears including a really large plastic gear from a broken card shuffling toy, a long brass screw and one of the springs out of the clock stuff.  I had to switch out the location of the spring a couple of times and finally settled on it being right out at the end under the head of the screw.  This applied enough pressure against the other parts to keep the clock arm from falling down and it can be adjusted to any angle.

The other side was a little easier to set up because I just added some holes to a small compass I had in my stuff and screwed it onto the outside and then painted it with a clear coat to keep it from being too shiny and new looking.

I was very pleased with how these turned out and it makes for an interesting visual appearance overall.  This pair of goggles started out as an experiment (of course) then turned into a requested item from someone that lives in the same apartment as my friend.  It looks like now, however, that it is going to be up for grabs as I am not sure he is interested in them anymore.  I'll have to keep posting on how it turns out.

New Goggle Project: Part 3

I forgot to post images of the screw pattern that I drilled into the body of these goggles when I was working on them before any of the paint was added.  You can see that I just used small Phillips head screws in regular intervals all around the face of the goggles.  This was pretty easy to achieve because there was a pattern of plastic fins on the inside of the goggles presumably to make them a little stronger near the lens plate.

The next find that I added came from a couple of old cameras I found at a thrift store and then disassembled just for the parts.  The cameras were from the '80s and, in fact, one was a disk camera.  A sort of a camera technology cul de sac to be sure.  There might have been more useful stuff inside an older camera but these were cheap to buy and I didn't feel bad about salvaging what I wanted out of them.  Warning: these things consumed quite a bit of time just trying to figure out how to take apart fully.  It sounds much easier than it really is.  These are the gears I took out and sanded a place on the lens plate to glue them down onto.

One of the gears is plastic and the other two are metal of some sort and after attaching with 5 minute epoxy I will paint back over with the metallic silver to make everything look like one mechanism.

I'm going to use a longer screw to put through the hole in the middle top of the plate to both secure the two sections of the goggles again like the plastic rivet did before but I am going to leave enough sticking out the front to give a way to add loupes later on.

Steps in Goggle Creation

Here is a breakdown of most of the major steps that it took to get my goggles completed.  I have put the pictures that I had on file to try to help with the visualization of the process.

The original goggles as they were when I purchased them from a local flea market.  Here I had removed the elastic strap and had to do some repair work using 5 minute epoxy to the round vents as they had a few breaks in them.   Next, I painted the base coat of Krylon Fusion black paint so any other paint would have a way to stick. I now believe that glueing on most of the components first would have been better since the flexible area became very sticky and attracted a lot of hair.  I glued several wing nuts and acorn nuts around the flip up lense assembly to make things a little more mechanical.  Then the radio tubes with their custom plugs were added along with gears on the side and an assembly from the car instrument panel with a bubble level added for effect.  The magnifying loupes have their own clip to attach them but also alows them to be removed at any time.  These were actually saved until the end along with some other items.  Finally you can see what I wanted to do with this project start to come into focus.  I only needed to add the rub n buff color, work a bit on the lenses and then cover everything in clear coat to preserve the painted details.

Sketched Gears

Just playing around with some filters on some of my gear photos.  View it full size, it has some interesting textures that way.

More Fun With Goggles

I started a few nights ago with the different sheets of plastic to try to cut these into shapes that would serve as metal plating on the goggles being steampunked.  I used some of my drafting tools to do things like draw rounded off corners and add some interesting angles then cut out the shapes for gluing.  These are some of the things I used:

I found out that the type of plastic that I had picked out is really very thin and I didn't feel like it would make much of an impression on the over all look of the goggles themselves.  Ultimately I am going to put that part on hold and just try to go with some of the other items that I've already collected.  I have several 6/32 wingnuts and cap screws that can both add a sort of a mechanical feel to the project.  I chose to place these around the section of the lense housing that flips up and I tried not to add anything that would interfere with its ability to open.  I used an epoxy that I picked up from Michael's that is specifically designed to adhere plastic and metal.  The cap screw and wingnuts themselves were purchased at an Ace Hardware store for less than $1 per packet of 6 pieces. 

The epoxy was a little tricky at first because I was not used to the how easily the fluids come out of their respective tubes and I ended up putting way too much out on the cardboard mixing surface.  You also have only a couple of minutes to spread the epoxy onto the parts you want to glue down so it is really best to only put out very little when you are attaching a part.  This is what they looked like after I had glued them down:

I had also found a pack of small metal gears at Michaels that were being sold in the scrapbooking section.  These were beside packs of metal clock faces and what were supposed to be tiny clock hands.  None of these were actually functional but the gears were really nice for this project and $6 bought 12 gears that were roughly 1/2" in diameter and some slightly smaller.  Instead of building a large mechanism on the side of the goggles I simply opted for adding two separate gears to give that essential steampunk look.  I know that not everyone is convinced that gears are the key to real steampunk but I like their look and they are pretty important to me.  The epoxy made sticking these on the side really easy:

I've got some larger pieces that I am debating whether or not they need to go on this set of goggles or if I need to save them for the gun or maybe a future set of airship tactical ocular shields.  I think I will take a little break from the construction for right now and pick it up again later.