In our community eye and ear pro is absolutely paramount. This is a great article on the subject! Well Eyepro anyway.
Bret Hunter is the founder and owner of TacticalRX. I met Bret at Big 3 East a few years ago and although I have 20/20 vision I am amazed by his glasses. Many shooters who use prescription lenses typically use their normal glasses as eye protection or they might get some form of prescription sports eyewear. This usually means an insert or flat lenses. Bret’s shooting glasses are curved and the prescription is 100% throughout the lens. Tim Yan did a review on them back in 2014.
I have seen some serious torture tests done by Bret. Here is a set of one of his glasses shot with #4 shot from a shotgun.
James Reeves even tested some of Bret’s glasses.
What are your glasses made of?
Bret makes his shooting glasses out of polycarbonate lenses that are made to his specifications. The glasses industry tends to use Trivex lenses. And while Trivex are strong and the material is used for Apache helicopter windshields, they are not actually that strong when it comes to prescription lenses. Once the lenses are ground an anti-scratch coating is applied to the back of the lenses. This coating actually makes Trivex behave differently and they become brittle. Bret has seen Trivex prescription lensesshatter like glass. This is one reason why Bret uses polycarbonate. Even Oakley uses polycarbonate for their lenses.
But how strong are they?
I was curious what the worst case scenario would be but in a realistic scenario. Shooting bullets at lensesis not something we shooters experience on a regular basis. The worst we could get would be spalling and fragmentation. Sure an out of battery detonation is probably more likely but I am not going to blow up a gun just to test it. I figure a decent compromise would be to have spalling hit the lenses directly by having the lenses against a steel target. So I put the lenses on a rubber dummy and positioned the lenses right next to my steel target.
The results surprised me.
The spalling from the 55gr fmj 5.56×45 cut the Trivex lenses in half. while the polycarbonate lenses caught the fragmentation.
This…