Custom optics and more

Okay, you're for real, cool. Sorry about that--I'm probably just bad tempered because my home network got taken down by a trojan last weekend and I've spent the entire week trying to recover.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Yup, I was trying to get some special alkali resistant glass now only made by Schott. Price was by the ton. But we found that a friendly glass blower, knew someone..etc. You might try local glass blowers?

George H.

=A0> this one guy and money _IS_ an object.

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No sweat Phil. I can relate... my exchange crashed a few times over the years. Spent many an hour fixing that sucker. Good luck with it. Rgds, Jim

There was once enough hobbyists in this area for dozens of companies providing services and products at that level. Much has changed.

For optical quality?

I don't mean to dispute your point. But I don't think glass blowers care much if the index of refraction, density, Abbe number, and the rest is a little bit messy. I would, on the other hand, care a great deal.

(I suppose it would be possible to break large hunks of it and check each piece for uniformity and hand-select bits that could be remelted and shaped. But I've not attempted any of that before and I'm not so sure how a glass blower might take to me if I did that, anyway.)

Were you getting some for optical use? Or just the alkali resistance?

Jon

Figuring to lambda/20 seems a bit OTT for refracting surfaces unless you have bags of time to spend on a hobby. How do you test to that accuracy with a homebrew setup on an aspheric lens?

In the UK you could get some of these from Skan a Schott Glass dealer with small amounts of some precut glass available ex-stock. Though you would be well advised to wait for a bit that is by happenstance the right size sat on their shelf as an offcut. They publish a stocklist periodically (I expect other special glass dealers do the same).

Obviously freight costs would be a bit of a menace for you.

Regards, Martin Brown

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Sorry Jon, you clearly have much more expertise than me. The alkali resistant glass was used to make RF 'light' bulbs. So index of refraction didn't matter much. I only thought that glass bolwers seem to have an internal network by which they can get small quantities of glass.

George H.

Well, I guess I am desperate enough to explore that possibility. So thanks for mentioning it.

Jon