Safety Glasses: Removing Light Scratches

We have a robust collection of safety glasses, typically accrued from FIRST robotics events where we keep them available as spares for teams, or for guests interested in visiting the pits. Every year, after Regionals or ROBOTICON, our Tampa FIRST Showcase event, we find more orphaned safety glasses that we add to the collection.

Unfortunately, the glasses tend to end up tumbled into a box, in quite the same fashion that most teams keep their glasses collection. Safety glasses used by robotics teams have a hard life anyway, but tossing them in a box is a pretty poor way to store them, contributing to scratches, dirt and other problems.

So we decided to clean up our act, starting with cleaning the glasses and, as we'll show here, polishing out some of the lighter scratches were possible, to restore as many of the safety glasses as possible to a useful condition.

Step 1: Materials

You'll need

• Safety glasses
• Toothpaste

Step 2: Rinse and Apply Toothpaste

Rinse the glasses before you apply the toothpaste. Then apply just a small amount and rub well across the lenses, on both sides the glasses.

Better yet, completely wash and disinfect them first (See Disinfecting Safety Glasses) , which gives you a good opportunity to separate out the lightly scratched glasses from more heavily damaged ones.

Step 3: Rinse and Dry

Rinse the toothpaste rub from the glasses, and dry with a soft clean cloth.

Step 4: Enjoy the View

The toothpaste rub works best on light scratches but other than the most egregiously damaged glasses will help improve most moderately scuffed safety glasses to basic usability again.

But the best thing to do after you polish up your safety glasses, is not to put them back in a box again!