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Spinning Lens Glasses

Clear vision through centrifugal force
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In the world of CNC machining there are usually great torrents of a milky-white cooling fluid spraying around the place. This is to keep the part and the tool from overheating and producing a distorted part or damaging the tool. CNC machines are also inside enclosures, to prevent flying metal embedding itself in nearby humans and also to confine the aforementioned torrents of coolant.

As good as CNC machines can be, they do need supervision, especially with new projects. An operator should be on hand to make sure that the machine doesn't continue diligently moving around it's tool path for an hour after it lost it's end mill or something. Here lies the problem, while the enclosure does have windows, with so much milky- white coolant being sprayed at a fast spinning tool, the stuff gets everywhere including all over the windows. To solve this, companies have developed a circular window that spins rapidly <link>. This means that coolant and bits of metal that land on the window are flung off by centrifugal force.

The natural extension to this idea is to make a pair of glasses on the same principle. Each lens is circular, and made of something tough like polycarbonate. Instead of being driven by a motor in the middle, the lens itself has gear teeth (Mod 0.6 feels about right) around the edge and is driven by a powered pinion and rests on 3-5 geared idlers hidden in the frame. A natural place for the motor is to align with the temples.

These glasses would have several advantages, now a CNC operator could get right into the enclosure and get a really up-close look at the process in complete* safety. Even better, money could be saved by omitting the enclosure entirely.

Other uses include cycling/motorcycling in the rain. For muddy events perhaps a continuous water feed to the center would wash off specs of even the stickiest mud.

Obviously motivated by <link>

* There will be a time period where having your face inches away from a multi kW cutting tool will be safe. The rest is about expectation management.

bs0u0155, May 26 2021

Visiport spinning window https://www.youtube...watch?v=YPVBnBK09OM
[bs0u0155, May 26 2021]

Rotary Goggles rotary_20goggles
[bs0u0155, May 26 2021]

Candidate motors https://www.amazon....07RVGSS94GKCBTMRP2J
[bs0u0155, May 26 2021]

Or go "Full Face" instead of glasses... https://www.google....mgrc=rVqmw1CoLi10HM
Might look weird, but it would work. [neutrinos_shadow, May 31 2021]

[link]






       a1. I just found the boat version myself. I can't work out why a: no one seems to make an edge-drive version and b: if you're going to have a strut leading to the central motor, why not add a wiper for double effectiveness?
bs0u0155, May 26 2021
  

       //How fast do you figure you'd have to spin your goggles and how big a motor will you need?//   

       The lens will be in the order of 50mm, say. That's the size of the spur gear in one of my 1/10 scale RC cars. Spinning it at 2000 rpm, with no load is pretty trivial, even at a 20:1 gear ratio, garden variety cheap 130-sized motors spin at 30,000-90,000 rpm. Although you'd go with a longer thinner motor like the dirt-cheap <link>. At 0.12A power draw, that's a full work day for a pair of them from a single 2200mAh 18650 Li Ion cell.   

       //Maybe a wiper scraping against the window so rapidly would wear out faster.//   

       Possibly, although the tighter tolerances and flat surface would be easy to engineer around. A line of high pressure air as a barrier curtain would be an alternative. There's always compressed air in a machine shop.
bs0u0155, May 26 2021
  

       I would think the centripungent forces will be somewhat proportional somehow to the diameter of the spinning disk. So a spectacule-sized clearview screen will have to spin x times faster than a window-sized one to have the same affect.
pocmloc, May 27 2021
  

       The reason no one sells glasses with spinning lenses is that it's too easy for your hilarious friends to shout "Look!" and point to your left or right, such that when you turn your head, gyroscopic forces cause the glasses to fly off your head and smash to the ground.
hippo, May 27 2021
  

       Enough speculation. You just need to purchase two of the devices linked by [a1], mount on glasses frames, perhaps a hat-mounted battery and seal it all in a waterproof casing with your usual prescription lenses and you can experiment.   

       As for precession, just spin each lens in the opposite direction from the other one.
pocmloc, May 27 2021
  

       they're $1750 each. I promise I'll make the glasses as soon as I have ~ $4k with nothing better to spend it on.
bs0u0155, May 28 2021
  

       Seems like the center of rotation wouldn't get cleaned very effectively. Therefore driving it from the edge doesn't gain much.   

       This seems to me like a very halfbaked idea for corrective lenses, but I think you might have something here for protective eyewear, or more specifically, a face shield. If you make a single center-drive viewport with the axis near the nose, and the disk roughly the size of the face, there should be a nice clear area in front of the eyes. Fill in around the edges to make a full protective facemask. When using your wet diamond blade to cut concrete, the water and cuttings splattered on your face mask get cleared away.
scad mientist, May 28 2021
  

       A head-mounted Dremel could be used to drive this and, as an added benefit, you’d never be without a means to file your nails
hippo, May 28 2021
  

       //a very halfbaked idea for corrective lenses,//   

       The bi-focals are proving tricky.
bs0u0155, May 28 2021
  

       Prescription weirdness is simple: a non-spinning lens behind the spinning piece. The spinning bit could be very thin, and "overlapping" the edges of the actual (optical) lens, ] shaped (to keep stuff from getting in between the 2 parts).
neutrinos_shadow, May 31 2021
  

       [hippo], I like the way you think. I'm always looking for alternative avenues for nail filing. Always.
blissmiss, May 31 2021
  
      
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