Oakley M Frame Strike

In this world, everywhere you turn, you face a certain danger along the way. The 5 senses which all human depends up on need to be protected at all costs. For now, we'll focus on the eyes.

Overview:
The Oakley M-Frame, at first glance, appears very appealing. Nice style, interchangeable parts, and best of all, the lenses available to this M-Frame are loaded with styles, as well as protection level. You can have from clear, to ultra slick and sickening darkness. But, could this great glasses have issues? You betcha.

Usages with the glasses:
Cycling, paintballing, running, hiking, climbing, and just normal tour/inspection driving.

Compare Oakley Yellow Heater to others, it out performs the following:
- Chopper Yellow lens
- Pro Snowboarding yellow lens
- Motocross Yellow Series lens

Functions:
The M-Frame:
The M-Frame is a two-prong (one on each side), and center rail retaining system. The lenses has two contact points on each side to attach to the M-Frame prongs, and then held together along the groove that runs from side-to-side in the frame itself. The design is quite unique and a blessing if you need to switch lenses based on the day's conditions. The frame is made of a semi-flexible, but very strong, poly-graphite material. It takes a bit of strength to bend it to the point where it may break. I haven't reach that point yet, and will not do so...the frame itself is $80. Not going to do it. The curvature of the frame fits perfectly on your face that the frame will not touch your forehead. The frame's arms will snuggly hold the frame in place, even if you jump up and down, or blast your ways through the field playing tags. With the aid of the bootstrap (the plastic tube that sticks to the end of the arms to prevent the glasses from falling off), you won't lose the frame any time soon.

The lenses:
There are about 240 combination of lenses, lens styles, and sizes. Lenses range from clear, to ultra uridium black, with Index Protection from the sunlight from 0 (light protection) to 4 (total protection of all sort), to facial type. The common misconception when purchasing the lenses is that the lenses do not fit everyone's faces. Why? The larger lenses, such as the Heater series, will fit smaller faces better. The reason why is that the lenses will cover not only your cheeks, but also your eye sockets, as well as half of your forehead. For you big faces, stick with the Sweep, and Hybrid S. Anyone else, you can go between Strike and Hybrid series. The cool thing about the lenses is that they're interchangeable. I use the Heater yellow for night cycling, and Sweep for summer day riding. The more intense the sunlight, the darker the lenses I go for.

Wind-dirt protection:
What a joke. The wind protection is mainly focused on the eyes, your forehead. Since the lenses doesn't hug your face, the wind-dirt will travels through the exposed nose ridge/holder, and the concentrated air flow will deliver any flying particles right into your eyes. The best thing to do is to wear a hat, or have a visor extends over your forehead to diver 80% of the air away from your face, and the glasses will take on the 20% of the remaining airflow.

Ballistic protection:
This is where the glasses shines well on. Since the Heater series lenses cover your forehead, eyes, and cheeks, there's very little room for the ballistics to hit your critical areas, beside flying through that small nose support area. Small pebbles flying from the car's rear tires, any where between 10 to 30 mph can be safely blocked by the glasses. Accidental hit by small tree branches, bushes, and even sticks, can be deflected away from your eyes. This also goes for babies who can punch you due to their hyper activeness...such as mine...

Light protection:
When Oakley states that the high definition optical material will aid you with visual enhancement, the company didn't joke around. Between having it on and off, the vision clarity improves little as 20% with it on at night with very little light to no light, and %50 during the day time. Depending the lens you're using, it can protect all the angles your eyes can scan throughout your field of visions. That means from glancing way up, way down, to the extreme on both sides.

Clarity:
I use the Yellow Heater lens for night riding, using in combination with my Blackburn X3 light, and my vision has a boost of 30% more clarity to the point where I can see all the cracks, pot holes, and rocks along the roads, comparing to no glasses at all. Daylight at dawn, around 7:30am, gives me enough clarity to see even further ahead than usual, and the sharpness of the ground 20 feet ahead of me increased dramatically. Using the Sweep Red Uridium combo for strong sunlight, you can still see quite a bit of details, sharpness, objects, and yet, give you plenty of shades to prevent you from squinting due to glares. If you're using polarized version, well, your clarity gets reduced significantly, since polarized lenses effect the light transmission rate significantly.

Comfort:
For short 30-minutes to 1 hour at a time, you probably feel the edge of the lenses hurt your cheeks, and the rubber arms of the frames scraps the side of your temple, and the top of your ears' valleys. Any greater than 1 hour at a time, you'll feel the edge digs into your cheeks, and worst yet, a bit of sweat will really burn the scraped areas at the ears' valleys. Find the appropriate lens sizes for your needs, which don't touch your cheeks at all. Smaller ones like the Hybrid S or the Hybrid will be perfect.

Overall:
It's a great pair of interchangeable glasses. Compare to the Juliet and the Romeo, it still has the great style to the wearer, the intimidation of a bad boy, the slickness for a sport freak, the protection for the conditions, and the ease of caring or replacement if the lenses are scratched.