Hey,
A friend of mine recently asked me what I thought about making a homemade eyeshade, since his was missing. This also came up recently in another forum post. I figured it shouldn’t be too tough to cut the same shape out of a thin piece of foam and use that. I happened to be at Wal*Mart tonight and walked past the foam sheets, so I grabbed a pack ($5 for 12 large assorted color sheets).
There’s not really much to this “how-to”. Basically, I just taped an old shade to the foam (to keep it from moving while cutting) and carefully cut the shape (I just used scissors, though a knife would have worked fine too). Then I used a small screwdriver to stab through the foam for the mounting holes. I used the black sheet to keep it original, but you could do other colors as well (it comes with red, black, yellow, white, green, and blue).
Now, of course a lot of people missing an eyeshade probably don’t have another eyeshade to copy, so rather than taping the other eyeshade, you could simply print the template from this thread: http://www.planetvb.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=3688 … tape it to the foam, and cut. I don’t have the measurements for the holes (I can measure and post them, but not tonight), so you could try printing the scans from that thread to scale and poking the holes there, or just align both ends with the nose, then align the center of the top, and poke holes where the pegs are on the holder. Note that the foam isn’t wrapped tightly around the holder, which would cause a straight and stiff eyeshade.
Once you’re done with that, simply press the new foam eyeshade over the pegs on your eyeshade holder. Of course if you were missing the eyeshade, you may be missing the holder as well. In which case, you’ll need to make a new holder. I believe some people have made them out of cardboard… or you could 3D print Hedgetrimmer’s model ( http://www.planetvb.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?post_id=22841#forumpost22841 ). Or even just get creative and maybe attach the foam with some double-sided tape.
Thoughts: I don’t know how well these foam sheets will hold up to use. It feels strong enough, but it is kinda thin, and I’m not sure how it’ll react with oils from contact with your face. Also, it has a slightly annoying odor, but it goes away. You’ll also see that there’s a bit of a gap around the shade. The original has puffier foam at the back to hide the gap… of course this doesn’t. It doesn’t really look bad, but if you look for it, you can certainly tell that it’s not and original shade. You could probably also use thicker foam, and make it more like the thick foam eyeshade from the prototype VB.
DogP
As promised here are some pictures. The foam is about a mm thick. I would of liked to use thicker really but this worked well.
