Optical Lens Manufacture
Kingsview Optical has been in business since 1996 and over that time has developed a reputation for quality and reliability in the field of precision optics here in the UK. We can manufacture optical lenses for a large range of requirements from 0.8mm diameter micro lenses up to 250mm diameter lenses.
We are able to produce custom optical lens designs for you or likewise if you have the lens design already we will be happy to produce the design for prototypes or high volume production.
CNC Optical Polishing
We have recently invested £250K into a brand new optical CNC generator and polisher from Optotech which arrived in November 2017. This is a major step forward and will enhance our capabilities in optical lens manufacture as well as showing our commitment to manufacturing first rate precision optics here in the UK.
The advantages of the CNC polishing include consistency of results where difficult lenses are repeated time and again. This means we are now better equipped to doing large batch sizes. Another advantage is the tooling costs to manufacture custom lenses is cheaper than manufacturing cast iron conventional tools. If your design requires a specific radius it is not a problem to manufacture tools to suit which our metalwork manufacturing does here. Us being able to manufacture the tooling ourselves again just speeds up deliveries and brings down costs.
Conventional Optical Polishing
Kingsview is also able to manufacture optical lenses using conventional polishing methods.
Kingsview bought a number of famous UK optics companies’ assets when they unfortunately went out of business, such as Achro Optics, Precision Tool and Intsruments (PTI), Cowley Level and Optical Instrument Balham Ltd. The acquired tooling and test plates of these companies means we have a large range of radii which you can base designs around incurring no tooling charge. This can be very useful in price when making very small quantities and prototypes.
Optical Assembly and Cementing
The lenses can be assembled in housings in our clean room assembly areas. We also cement optics using our air bearing centration table to ensure the highest standard of accuracy is achieved using Loctite or Norland adhesives.
Optical Coating
We also offer full optical coating for our lenses which we do ourselves from simple single layer to more complex multilayer coatings depending on your requirements.
Custom Optical Lens Capabilities
| Size: 0.8mm to 250mm |
| Diameter Tolerance: ±0.01 mm |
| Decentration (wedge): ± 10 second |
| Irregularity: λ/10 |
| Spherical Error: 0.5% of radius or better |
| Surface Quality (Scratch/Dig): 10/5 |
| Flatness: λ/10@633nm |
Custom Prisms
Kingsview makes prisms to any shape or size with the smallest currently made at 0.5×0.5 mm right angles. Over many years we have produced a standard range of periscope prisms for the British Challenger Tank and the M2 Abrams and were supplied to Helio Mirror Company. We are able to produce angles better than 10 seconds and can be confirmed with Rank Taylor Hobson auto collimators. We can also pitch polish to exacting flatness which can tested on a Zygo interferometer and mirror coat or A/R coat specific faces.
Example Prisms: Roof prisms, Penta prisms, Cube beam splitter, Right angle or whatever you require.
Custom Optical Prism Capabilities
| Size: 0.5mm to 400mm |
| Angle Tolerance: 10 Arc Seconds |
| Dimensional Tolerance: ±0.01mm |
| Surface Quality (Scratch/Dig): 10/5 |
| Flatness: λ/10@633nm |
Custom Filters
Schott, O’Hara, Kopp are the main suppliers of material for filter glasses used for a myriad of sets the world over. Kingsview has stock of many and can fabricate filters to any shape and size to suit your needs. This can include mechanical mounting cementing combining with vacuum coatings to form antireflection or bandpass filters. To test performance we use Parker Elmer Lambda 19 Spectrophotometer.
The types of industry we have produced filters in the past include military such as night vision applications and medical applications.
Custom Mirrors
We can produce spherical plano and cylindrical mirrors to virtually any shape or size. With custom coatings to meet your requirements be it front surface aluminium to full dielectric wavelength specific.
Custom Windows
At Kingsview we are able to manufacture windows of virtually any shape or size. We have a CNC edger and through use CAD/CAM we can profile very complex shapes fairly routinely.