Clear Acrylic Glasses Upgrade

When I got my glasses, they had some decent frames, nothing that special. So a while ago I decided to convert the grey, plastic glasses frames with some more fitting deep brown wood frames to give a nice wood + black steel look. But that wasn't enough - they had some issues, mostly that they were wood and would soak up lots of water and get deformed easily, so now - I made these, acrylic glasses frames!

As you may have guessed, they are made from acrylic - but note! I did not make the black rims around the lenses - these were stock from the store.

They are easy to make, with only a small piece of acrylic needed for this project. You will probably need to do a bit of tinkering with your glasses first to get them to be able to hold custom frames.

'Tis a simple instructable, you only need:

• Small offcut of acrylic
• Glasses with detachable sides/arms
• Hot Glue

Some tools you might need:

• Something to cut the acrylic with (not a regular saw blade)
• Belt Sander
• Hot Glue gun

The first step is to get the general size of your arms - these will be different for everyone so I won't give exact dimensions.

What you need to do is make a sort of copy of your original frame's arms and then cut them out of the acrylic. This can be done with a marker and then tracing around the outside of the original arms.

Then once everything is marked, you can cut out the general shape of the frames.

After you have the general shape, get over to your belt sander and grind it down to the exact size & shape - make sure to get everything right and to not snap the acrylic as it gets quite thin.

Do this twice (isn't that obvious?), then proceed to the next step.

So you have got your two arms, now you need to attach them. For my frames, there were two metal pieces that were on the sides of the frames - so to make it sit flush with the rest of the frames, these metal pieces needed to be on the side of the frames (confusing? see the pictures for more information).

To actually attach them, I used hot glue.

You would think that hot glue isn't that strong - but it really is. It is just that most people don't let the hot glue set hard before their impatience get's the better of them and they test it and it inevitably fails.

To speed up the setting process however, you can run the hot glue under cold water (such as from a nearby tap) - this allows it to set mostly. But you will still need to let it sit and harden fully before you start stress testing them and wearing them.

But guess what? You're done!

Thanks for reading, be sure to vote for the 'ible in the contests if you liked it.