Bifocal safety glasses

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I like to use the 3M Fuels as around-town sunglasses. Easy enough to find at a home improvement megastore; a pair only runs around $20 and take a lot more abuse than regular sunglasses.

Just like ice scrapers, you can never have too many extra sunglasses.

Or, you can just take the safety glasses you already have and like, and turn them into bifocals. I used these on my cycling glasses, and they work great. Once applied, it takes a bit of work to remove them, once the water evaporates. And you can trim them with scissors if needed, which I did.

Doesn’t everyone go to hardware stores on vacation?

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My friend Tom drove his newly-built Rambler roadster from LA to Tucson without realizing that he was wearing his bifocal safety glasses instead of his real glasses, is how good they are.

Let me know when I can buy cheap plastic safety glasses with my wacky astigmatism prescription. Because those things are nice.

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I get cheap prescription specs from Zenni optical online. The quality is about the same as I was getting from the optometrist, though I’ve had pricey designer frames (friends with massive employee discounts) that were a bit better built. Supposedly they have a heavy weight poly-carbonate lens that’s identical to what’s used on safety glasses. But its not certified, and I’m not sure if its the default lens or an up charge (I doubt its default mine seem pretty thin). A pair of specs from them have never cost me more than 36 bucks, but I have a very simple prescription. Specialty lenses will cost a bit more but its still insanely cheap most of the time. My last prescription sun glasses cost me like $8 with lenses.

In terms of them (or any glasses) not being safety certified: I’m the kind of idiot who will wear my normal script glasses as safety glasses most of the time. If I’m doing something that worries me I’ll make a point to throw anything that fits over my frames on, but for the most part I’m willing to trust that what I wear every day is good enough. I’ve not had the expected disaster yet. The cheapest available plastic lenses I tend to go for has so far caught wood and metal splinters, and even some broken screws, nails, and an air gun pellet or two. I’ve wrecked a pair of glasses or two but nothing ever seemed even close to making through. The bigger issue has been that my preferred frame style doesn’t offer a lot of coverage. So debris tends to go around the lenses and end up in my eye. Or occasionally cut my face near my eye (hence going for the over the frame safety glasses more often these days). So I’d say a decent, durable plastic lens, and a properly shaped frame and I’d feel OK for most situations. In my experience anything hitting hard enough to breach a thicker prescription lens is gonna either injury you anyway or tear the frames up enough to make the glasses more of a hazard.

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My local welding shop has basic reading-lens safety glasses for about $12. Non-prescription, no astigmatism, both eyes the same, so they’re basically equivalent to drugstore reading glasses, but for most uses that’s good enough for me, and it’s far better than wearing my prescription glasses with plastic goggles over them that fog up. Sometimes they also have them in Shade 5 Green, so they’re dark enough for oxy-acetylene torch welding (electric welding needs Shade 10 or more, but there’s room for glasses under the usual welding face shield.)

I’ve also been very happy with Zenni Optical; I need reading glasses because of presbyopia, and have a bit of astigmatism, but my distance vision’s normal so I can get by with single-focus lenses rather than needing progressive lenses or whatever, so the tradeoff is getting to try on frames at an optician vs. guessing what the measurements at Zenni really mean for shape and comfort. (And bifocals annoy me; they’re vaguely usable for reading a book, but for computer screens I want my whole central vision to have the correction.)

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Without the clarification later it would have been reasonable to infer that the vacation was at a hardware store.

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Doesn’t everyone go to hardware stores on their vacation?

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