Sk8Shades - Making Wooden Sunglasses From Skateboards

Sk8Shades, based in Durban, South Africa, makes hand-crafted sunglasses with wood recycled from used skateboards. Dave de Witt, the man behind the company, came up with the idea when his sunglasses began falling apart and he decided to use the wood from an old skateboard to create his first pair of Sk8Shades.

On the Sk8Shades website, Dave describes the creation process: Once the used boards have their grip tape removed and have been cross-cut, ripped, planed, sanded, laminated, squared, veneered, sanded and sized, they are ready for laminating into a curve. This is done, one-by-one, using clamps and moulds made from off-cuts of birch plywood. Shaping edging and grooving takes place on one of the bench-mounted routers and comes 24 hours after being removed from the moulds. Temples are shaped from the tails and noses retaining some of the graphics. All moulds, templates and tooling is made in-house using basic tools, woodworking machinery and a few Franken-tools made up from various pawn-shop finds. With +250 laminated glue joints in our layered frames and up to 200 in our Dirty or Clean frames, Sk8 Shades are rebuilt layer by layer to create a strong, lightweight and comfortable frame.

We were lucky enough to be given our very own Sk8Shades by Dave made using Triton tools and these are now proudly on display at Triton HQ.

Check out Dave's website to see more of his designs : www.sk8shades.com