My lab… and others…

The thread that briefly describes the , equipment of my laboratory.

Grinder- polisher.

This device is my essential tool when it comes to grinding and polishing of large mirrors. I built it myself, based on the factory grinding-polishing machines, and descriptions of such machines available in the literature; further enriched it with several solutions by. my own ideas. My machine has a continuously variable speed operation, and four independent crosshead speed relative to the spindle. I also used an element that causes the crosshead movement to be stochastic. Theoretically, with its help I can make mirrors of the diameter up to 500mm .

 

 

 

Grinder- polisher pedal-powered .

This machine has a foot pedal spindle drive via pulleys; the mirror (or other item) is grounded and polished manually. This enables full control of element's deflection as well as the speed and direction of rotation of the spindle. You can make with it very precise optical elements. When I worked on such machine in professional optical factory, it happened. I had to regenerate or even make an interference template, where the focal length had to agree to the micron, and precision in terms of deviation from the ideal sphere was lambda/20. The disadvantage of this machine is the small diameter of the elements that can be created.. Once I made a mirror with a diameter of 140mm and this is almost maximum what can be achieved with it. 120mm mirrors are made on it quite comfortably.. This grinding-polisher was purchased from PZO for some ridiculously little money.

Carl Zeiss vacuum coating installation.

Coating installation allows for layering aluminium with MgF2 protection. It is used mainly for coating various “auxiliary elements” for my own needs, but it is possible to coat small mirror as well. Its disadvantage is a small size and lack of electron gun, and the advantage is it is very quiet and quick to achieve a high vacuum.

 

Foucault's Knife

In my knife blade feed rate is done using micrometer. In addition I provided it with an element that allows for easy and precise adjustment of the mirror in the focal.