Working on Wood Snow Goggles

Spooky...

I'm working on a few pairs of snow goggles this week.  I have an order for one pair of goggles for a hands-on museum exhibit in Ontario.  I think the I'll probably send them a new pair of the Wapusk snow goggles that I've made and talked about before.  But while I'm working on those, I wanted to try reproducing some snow goggles that we found on Baffin Island during a survey in 2010.  The Baffin Island goggles are the ones in the photos in this blog post.

Claude is recording the goggles where we found them lying on the ground.

One of the guys we worked with said that his grandfather from Pond Inlet had a pair just like this.  They are big and round and look like owl eyes.

To start the reproductions I printed 1:1 photos of the goggles to use as patterns and split a  3 1/2" diameter spruce log down the middle to create the half-round blanks to begin with.  I don't have the original goggles to refer to, but I believe this should give a pretty good match to the wood grain in the artifact.

For most of the coarse shaping, I use a sanding disc on an angle grinder.

I stop frequently to refer to the reference material and plan my next series of cutting or grinding.

For the finer shaping, I switch to the dremel tool.  A coarse sanding drum works for a lot of the details, like the hollows around the eye slits on the inside of the goggles.

I don't cut out slots for the eye holes. The originals were probably whittled and gouged out by hand with a sharp knife.  I'll switch to sharp knife for the final finishing and to leave the appropriate tool marks on the finished reproduction, but even with the dremel tool, the principle is the same.  I'm slowly gouging down, deeper into the wood until it becomes paper thin and the eye slits emerge.  I think you can see in above the side-by-side comparison with the reference material that this is how the slits were made in the original.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast