Oakley Debuts C Six Carbon Fiber Sunglass Frames

by Noah Joseph (RSS feed)
Aug 29th 2009 at 10:01AM

There's little to dislike about carbon fiber. It's lightweight. It's incredibly strong. It's exotic. And let's face it, it just looks cool. It's also incredibly complicated to work with, which makes it very expensive. So while they can make simple objects like wallets out of the stuff, making something more complex like, say, sunglasses frames, can be infinitely more difficult. Which would explain why, while some optic frames have been adorned with the stuff, they've yet to make complete frames from it. Until now.

Oakley has been working on producing a carbon fiber sunglasses frame for some time now, and details have just emerged. They're calling it the C Six, and they teamed up with motorsport engineers Crosby Composites to create it. But rather than trying to lay it into the right shape, they've machined the frames out of solid billet blocks of carbon fiber using advanced CNC drills, spinning at 10,000 rpm for 24 hours to create just one pair. No wonder they're only making 250 of them, and charging $4000 for each pair.

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