Lens materials for Reglazing Glasses
Posted: Thursday, January 13, 2011
by Kevin Styles
The Greatsailfishing Company
Glasses today come in a large variety of materials from plastic (acetate) to high tech titanium. Most spectacles are chosen however based on their style and how they look cosmetically.
The lenses used for glazing and reglazing glasses come in a wide array of materials as well - but each lens material has characteristics that make it useful for a particular use.
The term CR39 actually comes as an abbreviation of "Columbia Resin #39," which has its origins in the late 1930's America when a company called Columbia Southern Chemical Company had been tasked with developing a material suitable for oophthalmic lenses. The developers tried 39 compounds and materials before settling on this - a resin that had good structure, thermal properties and relatively easy to manufacture. Instead of making glasses though, it was originally combined with fiberglass and used to make aircraft components such as fuel tanks (of course this was during WWII).
After the war many devlopers started to make glasses lenses out of CR39 material. It was a common "target" material as it had some specific properties that made it an excellent material for making glasses or spectacles from.
It was able to be made in sufficiently large volumes that it became cheap to purchase, and when used in glasses were easily formed into spectacle lenses. As it was a hardened resin, it was highly resistant to lens scratching, was durable, had outstanding shelf-life (it did not degrade over time even when exposed to sunlight) - and of course had very good clarity. These glasses lenses are also very lightweight and less prone to shattering than glass which of course is important when the spectacles are worn on a regular basis and safety is always an issue when materials such as glass or even polycarbonate are in proximity to the eye.
The biggest problem with CR-39 lenses in the early days of development was the shrinkage of the lens in manufacture that made it very difficult to actually cast a lens with a specific power and so address a prescription for glasses. This became the biggest barrier to widespread success of the material for making glasses until the late 1940's when a new way of casting the glasses lens was developed as well as a suitable process for grinding and surfacing the lenses to make them accurate and suitable for making spectacles from.
From that point there was a constant stream of improvements to the material itself as well as the manufacturing processes used to convert the blank lenses into optical lenses to correct vision - issues such as lens coatings, further hardening of the surface and improvement in quality all continued to make the CR-39 lens material the dominat choice for making spectacles for over forty years.
Spex4less provide a full glasses reglaze service as well as supplying cheap glasses online.
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